Sequelae
by aeraecura
Summary: Undyne, Sans, and a completely inconsequential pair of siblings have been given second chances at life—or something like it. Now what..? (This is the second story in a series of three.)
1. Onryō

Now that half of Gerson's customer base was dust and the rest had fled to the capital, business was getting to be downright dismal. Whole days went by without any customers, unless you counted the occasional lost Temmie that wandered in after forgetting where she lived.

He never considered closing the shop. It gave him something to do with his time, an excuse to get out of that stuffy old house for him and his guest both. She didn't say much when he first invited her—all right, more like he _told_ her—to tag along, but he left, and she followed. He figured it might do her some good to help push around boxes and sort through old junk instead of staring at the wall for hours on end. At the very least, she could stare at a different wall for a change.

It helped, a little, maybe. There was no special moment where her old self came back out, nothing like that, but there were little flickers of _somebody_ in there. She started talking again, some days, which he thought was a good sign. And if ever there was an expert on luring monsters out of their shells, it would be him, now wouldn't it?

Bah. Maybe if she was another turtle, and supposed to have a shell, it might have been that easy...

* * *

With so few monsters passing by the shop, the ones that did come in seemed especially noisy. Or maybe they really were just that loud, since even _he_ could hear 'em before they came in.

"Oooh, look at these!" squealed one kid, twisting her head all around to try and see through a battered old pair of glasses with swirly lenses. Her friend, an alligator with a mess of blonde curls, looked up from the tea box in her hands.

"Catty, those are basically—"

"MEGA cute?"

"—MEGA nerdy?"

"BRATTY!"

The one named Bratty, the alligator, cracked her gum. "What kind of a friend would I be if I wasn't, like, completely truthful?"

"…Hey, what do YOU think?"

"…Yeah, what DO you think?"

They turned to a third monster, who'd been busy trying to light up a cigarette with fire magic. "Huh? Uh..." His eyes darted around, nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Mostly 'cause he was a long-tailed cat. "They're… literally just weird-looking old glasses?"

Off went the weird-looking old glasses. "Bratty, you're both like BREAKING my HEART."

"Hey, I never said they were—"

"BREAKING."

"—like…"

"MY HEART."

"Not-cute or anything…"

"…"

"…"

On went the weird-looking old glasses. "…So, do you guys wanna get milkshakes later?"

"Ugh… can we not go to Grillbby's? Snowdin is way too creepy, and that bunny girl's TOTALLY gonna be—"

"Oooooh, wasn't she the one that was like—"

"…a huge downer? She keeps posting on Undernet about how this guy that she liked disappeared, so he's totally… you know…"

"…Ohhhhh."

"…Yeaaah."

"That's, like, a downer."

"A WICKED downer."

The alligator cracked her gum even louder than before.

"…"

"…"

The girl-cat stuck out her claws to inspect her nail polish. "…Ugh. Just talking about that stuff is, like, bad vibes."

"Definitely."

"SUPER bad vibes."

"The WORST vibes."

She bounced to her feet. "Hey, wait! We SO should invite her along anyway, then we could have, like—"

"A fourth wheel?"

"—a double DOUBLE date!"

"(This was a date?!)"

"…Ooooh, maybe that would cheer her up?"

"And we could totally set them up!"

"…Catty… I thought YOU thought Burgerpants was cute?"

The other cat's fur poofed out as he nearly swallowed his cigarette.

"Hgggkk… you guys actually… Wait, that's not my real name—!"

"Sharing is caring, Bratty! SHARING IS CARING!"

"UHHHH?!"

(In less than a minute, they said all that. Did monsters ever talk so fast when Gerson was a kid? He was half-deaf, now, but there was no way even his younger self coulda kept up.)

By the time the kids left, the first cat was still wearing those old glasses, the alligator was furiously typing something into her cell phone, and the second cat was puffing away on his cigarette as he groused about vacation time. Gerson's ears rang.

At the back of the store, from the top of a big crate, came a raspy cough.

"Smells like... freaking... catnip. _Blegh_."

If he were the paranoid type, he might've worried that he'd finally gone loopy over these past couple of weeks, ever since his "guest" showed up on his doorstep, naked and melted around the edges and gibbering to somebody that wasn't him. She could hardly limp three steps before losing her balance or tiring out, yet she somehow managed to vanish the instant another monster came along. The possibility of her being a hallucination didn't much bother him, since if she was real, she was real, and if she wasn't, well, he might as well keep behaving otherwise, since there was nothing he could do about it... though that would be real embarrassing, now wouldn't it? Finding out that she was nothing more than a senile old turtle's imaginary friend, _after_ he'd already sent that note to the queen... wah hah!

"You coulda kicked him out before he lit up." Gerson dropped a handful of change in the till. "I wouldn't have stopped you."

Undyne reached through a gap in the crate's lid and pulled out an artifact, a rounded glass whatsit that sent out green sparkles in the light. Some of 'em were just worthless baubles collected during his adventuring days, but the mystical ones tended to open locked doors, do funny things to your stats, or just up and explode if you arranged them in the wrong order... or the right one, if you were in the right mood. Hell if he could remember which ones were which, though.

"Don't... wanna... let them see," she said, coating the glass orb with slime as she rolled it from hand to the other. Like a bar of soap, it jumped from her hands and dropped back into the crate. There was a sharp _crack_ and a puff of smoke, which was less reminiscent of soap. It also smelled like green apple pie.

"Huh, so that's what that one did," Gerson said. Undyne grimaced apologetically.

"...Anyway, c'mon now," he went on. "The toughest monster in all the Underground is scared that some kids might think she looks funny?" He almost pointed out how much like a kid she sounded herself, since the last time she'd used that exact phrase, she was no more than 13 and all self-conscious about her scales changing color. But certain monsters got real touchy about that kind of thing, scale color or horns or what-have-you. He could never relate.

Undyne descended into a sullen silence, poking at something else in the crate. Bah, so much for trying to be sensitive.

"...Well, you know what I mean."

She burbled something under her breath.

"Eh? Whuzzat?"

From out of the crate, she managed to find a shard of the broken orb, no longer glowing. She tried to drop it back in, but it stuck to her hand until she scraped it off.

"Not… tough. Never… was."

* * *

Undyne bent over the kitchen sink, twisting her neck to fit her head under the spout as she scrubbed at her hair. Gurgling, bubbling noises drifted up from the drain, the likes of which Gerson had never heard before.

"We have a tub, y'know." He picked up an echo flower, twisted off the blossom, and set the rest aside on a mound of leaves and broken stems. You could eat those parts too, but they weren't much good for sea tea. "...Or if you're concerned about the water bill, there might be a lake somewhere around here, if you look hard enough."

Expressionless, like she hadn't heard a thing, Undyne wrung out her hair, until the sleeves of her sweater were soaked and dripping from the stray drops of watery sludge. He could've made a fuss about the plumbing getting ruined, but her hair dripped everywhere even after she ruined all his towels trying to get it dry, just as she left slimy smudges on everything she touched, so he'd just accepted the mess in the same way he accepted the onset of back pain: better than the alternative.

He spun the tray of petals around to look for a bare spot on the foil, and found none. The echo flower in his hand whispered incomprehensibly. "You want some tea? Looks like we'll have some left over."

Undyne let her hair fall from her hand and hang limp like soggy seaweed against her shoulder.

"...Eh, Undyne?"

He gave her a minute, but got nothing back. It happened sometimes, she just sort of zoned out for no apparent reason, staring off at nothing.

...Bah. Having watched her grow up, it seemed like Gerson should've been able to guess at what she was thinking, but silence (meaningful or otherwise) was normally so rare from her that he didn't know how to interpret it. He pushed himself out of his chair with a grunt. "Well, suit yourself. I'm still making some."

Undyne slid just far enough out of the way for him to get to the sink and fill up the teapot, picking at the frayed ends of her hair, the stained spot on her sweater underneath.

"Ger...son."

"Changed your mind?" he asked.

"Do... you. Remember. What the... surface... looks. Like."

"...Huh? The surface?"

Undyne nodded.

"The surface world... I remember it about as well as I remember most things, I suppose." He lit the stove with a bit of fire magic. It didn't come any more naturally to him than it did to that cat with the cigarette, but he'd had a whole lot more time to practice. "...But you might as well ask what a monster looks like."

Undyne scowled to herself, like she was trying real hard to remember something too. "Around... here. I. mean. Like... around... the moun...tain."

Gerson scratched his scalp beneath the pith helmet. Aside from some smart-aleck kids trying to find a quick shortcut to finishing their history homework, he hadn't had much reason to think about the surface in a long time. Nobody else was old enough to have even _seen_ it, except the king. Plus old Fluffybuns' smarter half, but if Toriel was ever going to return, she would've done it by now. "Hmmm... lots of trees. Cedars, mainly, though if the humans kept cutting 'em down at the rate that we all were, there might not be so many left. Ebott's the biggest mountain around here, everybody knows that, and there were smaller ones off to the north... northwest, too. Anything more than that... I couldn't tell you. Doubt any human villages are still where they used to be."

"There's a... city," Undyne said. "And... the beach... is... past there."

"Nah, the humans had settlements all over, but nothing you'd consider a 'city' even by Underground standards. The ocean's that way, though, you're right. Did Asgore tell you about it?"

"...No."

The water bubbled. Undyne slid further out of the way so he could take down two mugs from the cupboard.

"Just a guess, then?"

"No."

Gerson looked at her, tried to figure out if something in particular was bothering her. Was it that he'd mentioned Asgore? Back when she'd first reappeared, she'd kept rambling about hurting a monster, and how he needed to tell the king, and the guard, because she "wasn't going back". When she was a little calmer, he'd broken the news to her about Asgore and her troops, but then she'd just nodded sadly like she already knew. He didn't know what to make of it at the time, but pursuing the topic of what had happened to the Underground inevitably led to mentioning Alphys, and that had had, er, mixed results. When he first asked if she needed help from somebody, maybe that doctor friend of hers, the answer... it wasn't a yes.

Undyne limped to the table, grabbing into the edge to pull herself into the chair. Halfway sprawled out, halfway folded up, trying not to melt on the tray of flower petals which she hadn't been able to help him gather. He appreciated the thoughtfulness, even if she still got the table a little grubby.

"I remember. The way it. Was. When we... got... out." Undyne waited, as if for some kind of validation, but Gerson was too busy wondering if he'd missed something. "Don't... you?"

"I, er, can't say that I do. When was that?" he prompted, bringing over the two cups of tea.

Undyne let her head tip to one side, at the kind of angle that seemed like it should've cracked something, as she squinted into the cyan steam rising from her cup.

"Now. ...Not... _now_, but... it's... what was supposed to... happen. Frisk... broke the... barrier. Without killing... anybody. Even when we... tried... to kill. Them. Mostly... uh. Me. ...A... lot."

"...Hhehhh." Her expression twisted, her fingers squirmed like they had a mind separate from hers. Gerson waited.

"They... wanted to... be friends. Instead. And I didn't, but... they were... NICE... all the... time. Hardly... fought. Ever. And they... broke the... barrier. Some. Somehow. We got out, and... all the other humans... were scared of us at first, 'cause... they thought we'd... make them sick, after we... were gone so long. Or... s-some...thing. We... almost fought, but... when they saw... Frisk was okay, it... made them... not worry so much. And they... listened to them, and... they were willing to... make peace. It... took a long time, but we... all left... every...one... down here... went to the... surface. And, Frisk... nobody... knew who their... parents were... and they didn't... say. So Toriel... adopted Frisk... for real... later. And... Papyrus and Sans lived with... them."

Gerson slowly sipped his tea. This was the most that Undyne had ever said to him since that last day, when she came rushing into his shop in all her armor and tried to make him evacuate. And, all right, she was rambling about Toriel and humans and the surface, but it seemed like something of a breakthrough nonetheless.

"Frisk..." he said, carefully. "That was the human..?"

"Yeh. Yeah."

All righty, then. "And Sans, he was the one that you said that you..."

Undyne stopped to cough into her sleeve, breathing ragged. The tea might've helped, anything made with echo flowers was good for the throat, but she didn't touch it. "He... wasn't supposed to... he... ...every...thing that... happened, this... this time... ...The humans... figured out why... he's... so short, and... weak. Ost... ost... ...something. Don't know the... name. They knew how to help... Papyrus, he was... really happy... about that. They liked... Alphys... 'cause she was smart, and... knew how to... invent stuff they... needed. 'Cause they... messed up the air, a, a long time ago, and... I don't... know... that, either. But it... made her a heroine, to... them. Asgore wanted to... turn himself in, 'cause of the other... humans... but they, decided, not to... do any, anything. They liked him, too, and... they were really... curious... and about Toriel, too, and... you, too. 'Cause you're... uh. Really. Really old."

"Sounds about right, hah."

"Napstablook... got to be with their cousin, again, and he had the... show, he wanted... that... snowdrake kid, he... went back to his family... Toriel... got to be a teacher... I was one too. It was... pretty fun, but kinda boring, but... that was okay. Didn't. Want to... do anything... really dangerous, since... Alphys and I..."

Her voice cracked, and she coughed again, trying to catch her breath. It took longer this time.

"...Frisk... had this... power... that nobody... knew about. Everyone was happy, but they... went back to, when they... first fell. And instead of... making friends, they... killed... everyone instead. If they wanted, they could've just... killed... their mom, and... me, and... M, Mettaton... I guess. But they went back... erased everything that happened... everyone... ...they killed monsters that... never hurt them. Yuuya wasn't even... ...but... Frisk... still... went... back."

Undyne looked up at him, expectant. Having lost the thread of what she was talking about at least five minutes ago, Gerson had nothing to say. He clicked his beak. How long had she bottled up this... well, whatever-it-was? Some kind of nice dream.

"...Not... lying."

"I never called you a liar, little guppy."

"Or. Crazy."

"Well, it takes one to know one, eh?"

Undyne narrowed her eye, then deflated. She slumped in her chair, pressing her hands flat on the table. Her tea had to be cold by now. "Everything... after... even what I... did... ...can't tell Asgore, now, but... it's... all, 'cause... of Frisk. When they... come back... again... I'll... kill them," she whispered. "Make up... for it... then."

The sink quietly gurgled. Through the kitchen window, gems twinkled in the cave walls. Gerson took a long sip of his sea tea.

Monsterkind had survived the human—Frisk, whatever their name really was—just as it had survived certain other humans who _wanted_ to do as they'd done, and hunger, before they were all able to figure out what crops would grow underground, and war, but...

"Hope it never has to come to that."

"I'll... kill... them. Get out. Of here. And find them. Whatever... it takes..." Undyne repeated to herself. Her hands curled into fists. "I'll... kill... them."


	2. Eucatastrophe

Light blinded Cabbage even before they'd opened their eyes; they rolled onto their belly to get away, squishing their whole upper body into the pillow against which they'd been propped up. Something in their side scraped painfully together as they moved, like a set of grinding teeth. A machine beeped.

Their vision adjusted. They were in a little room, white and windowless, in a bed with crisp sheets that looked green but smelled like bleach. Lemons and bleach. It made their throat hurt. Sounds droned outside, and Cabbage rested facedown as they listened, too groggy and stupid to think. Their whole body was stiff and sore, but the pillow was soft and it felt good to not move, so they halfway-dozed while whatever medicine had been keeping them asleep wore off. The vague noises outside ceased to be background static, and became a voice on an intercom, the squeak of a wheeled cart, claws and hooves on linoleum.

_...Oh._ They thought. _The hospital_.

Cabbage squirmed their way around to a sitting position, their range of motion limited by the magical bandages that encased their body like a cuirass. Green magic, like the kind that they themselves could produce, but stronger. And lemon-scented, for some reason. Experimentally, they pressed a hand into the bandages over their chest, watching the green light flicker across the white sheets. Their fingers tingled.

Beside their bed stood the source of the steady beeping, a tall metal box on a cart with a square screen on one side, angled away. Cabbage shuffled further down along the bed and leaned until they could see what was on the screen:

**99/15 HP**

—and the outlined shape of an inverted, pulsating heart.

Cabbage leaned back. This wasn't the first time they'd woken up in this place, so it didn't scare or surprise them as much as it otherwise might have, but the events that led up to them being here were all in a jumble. They remembered a dark laboratory filled with machines whose purpose they didn't understand, and a skeleton in a blue coat, and an Amalgamate... and the place past the forest in Snowdin, the RUINS. They'd gone there because the skeleton, Sans, told them they needed to find the queen, but they didn't think that they succeeded, because all they remembered was a yellow flower. A little yellow flower with a face. And after that...

Slowly, to avoid any further protest from their bandaged body, they reached back to touch the base of one wing. They found nothing but gauze and tape.

...Oh.

Cabbage was sitting stiffly upright, and as they lowered their hand, their posture didn't change; the bandages around their midsection wouldn't let them slouch or slump even if they'd tried. So they sat very still, listening to the SOUL monitor beep, and they were quiet. The inside of their head was quiet, too. All they thought was, _oh_.

* * *

It seemed like the kind of twisted bargain a witch might offer in one of their stories—their lovely, sparkly wings, in exchange for their sibling's life. If you were selfless enough to make the right choice, in one of those stories, you'd get to have both of the things you wanted, and lose nothing. Cabbage would have done it, but they never had the chance. Unless sneaking into the queen's laboratory _was_ their choice, and they'd wasted it by doing the wrong thing.

Monsters came and went; a spider in a nurse's scrubs, a maniacally cheerful doctor who was the source of the lemon-scented bandages. They prodded at Cabbage, examined their SOUL, answered anxious questions about their siblings' whereabouts. And they had their own questions about what happened in the RUINS; what attacked them, and how, and when. The queen wanted to know.

Cabbage said as much as they could, but trying to think of answers to these questions was like being near a too-bright light. They could only manage a few moments before it made them dizzy and confused, and they had to stop. Finally the doctor gave them a sad smile and touched their arm, and told them to go to sleep and not worry about it. They nodded mutely, the broken edges of their exoskeleton scraping with each breath.

_Those_ thoughts came oozing back. In the past, Cabbage had found ways to distract themselves, reading or spending time around their brash, noisy friends, until they could almost believed they'd forgotten them, because those thoughts were like amber; if they sank into them for too long, they might never escape. But there were no books here, no friends to wait for them to wake up and then snap at them for letting themselves come to harm _again_. Lace was lying comatose elsewhere in the hospital, surrounded by noise and light and strange monsters, and Reaper Bird was stuck at home with only a Loox and a small army of Froggits for company. Before today, they'd at least all been together, and Cabbage could fly. What good was a moth without wings? It wasn't a moth at all, just a weird, fuzzy bug.

_Idiot_. _Look what you did._

_Idiot_.

_**Idiot**_.

When they weren't in a sleepy haze from the pain medicine, or staring at the wall and quietly hating themselves, Cabbage sometimes wondered about the queen and the fish Amalgamate she had hidden in her laboratory. They never did learn how long the Amalgamate had been there, and they could think of no good way to find out. They wondered if it was still there, floating in its tank, silent and alone. Reaper Bird spent a long time in the laboratory, and it was a bleak place, but it had the other Amalgamates for company. It was never _alone_.

So maybe they'd misunderstood the doctor's questions. Maybe the queen knew what Cabbage had done, and where they were before they went into the RUINS, and she was testing them somehow. Waiting for a confession of guilt, after breaking into her laboratory with intentions of theft. But if the Amalgamate was a secret, wouldn't she _want_ Cabbage to say nothing, even if staying quiet meant letting a monster languish alone..?

They almost told the doctor, but they could never quite bring themselves to do it. They were too tired and, had their own worries, and anyway, there was nothing useful they could do for the Amalgamate. The queen's friend Sans knew about it, so by the time Cabbage woke up in their hospital bed, he would have done something to help. By now, he would have _had_ to do something about the Amalgamate. If Cabbage tried to get involved, days after the fact... they'd already lost their wings, maybe this time somebody would lose an arm or two, if they tried.

They said nothing. They'd already made one terrible mistake, but they could make up for it now by being quiet. Like a good knight. But they hoped, as they sat in their hospital bed, that the Amalgamate really did get out, somehow. They hoped it was happier than they were, wherever it was.

* * *

A thick bundle of plants with rumpled leaves and pink puffs of blossoms sat at Cabbage's bedside. The stems were too long for the little glass serving as a vase, and the plants stuck out at an awkward angle.

Considering why they were in the hospital, flowers seemed like a gift in slightly poor taste. Maybe one of their housemates sent it. _You're gone! Thanks to that flower, we're free of you lunatics! FREEEEEE!_

The nurse took his hand away from their SOUL. With another set of arms he was taking down notes on whatever information he'd gained from it; Cabbage didn't listen whenever it was explained to them. They didn't know why they should. "Considering how you started out, your SOUL is healing pretty fast," the nurse remarked. With a third set of arms, he began to weave layers of sticky silk around their midsection to replace the old bandages.

Cabbage didn't care much about the state of their SOUL, but their _heart_ was pounding like it wanted to run away.

"...Something wrong?"

"Errrrr." Cabbage gulped, and reminded themselves that they would make a terrible meal. Too small and fuzzy. "I... was... w-wondering about. Er. That. H-how long have they been there?"

"How long— oh, yeah!" The nurse finished wrapping Cabbage up and stepped away, and they breathed for the first time in several minutes, give or take a bit. "Yeah, that was from your friend."

"...My... friend."

They didn't have any friends. Maybe one of the Froggits really had left the flowers, then.

"The one with that goofy hat?" He motioned to indicate the size and general shape of said hat, and peeled off several sets of gloves, and put away the medical chart. "They were pretty quiet... but they brought this in and wanted to give it to, uh, to you I think. They left it up front while you were asleep this morning. There's a note."

Oh. Hmm. Not a Froggit, then. Cabbage tried to remember any such monster fitting that description. The mention of a hat evoked a sense of familiarity, but they'd also seen plenty of monsters with hats in their life, so it didn't really narrow anything down. It could've been anyone, up to and including three Froggits in a coat.

They let out an uncomfortable giggle, which was a mistake firstly because it hurt, and also because the nurse then looked up with an expectant gleam in all eight eyes. They wanted to hide under the sheet. Instead they reached over for the little makeshift vase, trying and failing to find some way to move that wouldn't send unpleasant twinges through their semi-healed exoskeleton.

There was a sparkly ribbon tied around the plants, and a folded square of paper with a hole punched in one corner, looped around the ribbon. Cabbage sniffed a flower, pinching a leaf until sap dripped from the broken edges. Milkweed? What were they, a little caterpillar again?

They unfolded the note.

The doctor did not tell me much, when I

went back to ask, but I was with the queen

when we were in the RUINS. I never learned

your name, or why you followed us, and I

feel bad. I still don't know, but wish I did.

And now I'm babbling again. Oh no.

I know I shouldn't. Let me try again.

I read your cards, and looked at leaves, and now

I want to say: I think your luck will change.

Not soon, or now, I think, but if you wait...

...Has this gone on too long? I always say

too much in notes, and don't know when to stop.

I'll try again... again? I'm sorry that

you're hurt. I hope that you heal soon. That's all.

(I have siblings too.)

The writing started tiny and shrank down into gibberish as the paper ran out. Cabbage blinked. _Luck_. Maybe this really was a tasteless prank.

Cabbage huffed, winced, then crumpled the note and tossed it aside.

The nurse laughed nervously, flashing his fangs. "Well, at least you got that out of it, huh? Those flowers?"

"...I suppose." They set aside the milkweed. Part of them wanted to throw _that_ too, but then the nurse would have to clean up the broken glass, which would be unkind _and_ extend the amount of time he had the be present.

After he left, Cabbage tried to go back to sleep. The cobweb bandages actually helped, and they weren't as sore as they'd been, but something nagged at them. They scooted laboriously over to retrieve the note, smoothed it out, and read it again, tapping out a one-two pattern with their fingers. _One-two. One-two. One-two. One-two. One-two._

They scrunched up their face. They folded the note back up, still holding the sparkly ribbon. They fiddled with the ribbon, tapping their fingers against their knee. Then they plucked a handful of milkweed leaves, looked around to make sure that they were _definitely_ alone, and crammed them into their mouth.

* * *

The magic bandages came off, and the doctor told Cabbage that they would have to start moving around to heal any further. Whether they healed or not, their wings wouldn't grow back and Lace wouldn't wake up, but getting devoured by a giant spider would be less agonizing than suffering through whatever a disappointed version of the doctor might sound like. _You don't want to get any better? But we worked so hard to glue you back together. Don't you appreciate it? Not even a teeeeeeeensy tiny bit? _...Besides, they needed to see Lace.

Learning to navigate even a small room on two feet was like venturing into a different world, flattened into two dimensions that left them trapped on a single horizontal plane. It wasn't long before they could hobble around without becoming extremely closely acquainted with the floor, but if they wanted to see over the edge of their sibling's bedside, they had the drag a chair over from across the room and then clamber up. It was better than having to ask for help, but not by much.

Once they were there, they never knew what to say. The monitor by Lace's bedside remained steadily at **2/2 HP**, but they weren't sure if their sibling could even hear them. Even if they knew what to say. Even if there was _anything_ to say. _I'm sorry that I let this happen? I'm sorry for not being a better sibling?_

Cabbage kicked their feet, perched at the edge of the chair. The ribbon from the note sparkled, wadded up and tangled around their fingers. _Shine, shine._

They wondered if the human would have acted as they did, killing every monster they could find, if they understood how widely the effects of their actions would ripple out. Cabbage didn't know much about humans, but they'd read their stories, complicated ones and ones they told their children at bedtime when they wanted to impart some kind of moral. There was a story about a fox monster and a human prince searching for a magical bird, and a story about twins lost in the woods, and a story about an abused girl who fell down a well and was adopted by a witch. Humans liked stories, and they valued things like friendship and family and compassion, sort of, sometimes. Obviously they didn't like monsters outside of fairy tales, but... Cabbage didn't think they would want to be around somebody that had killed so many of _anything_, if they were a human. Unless humans, _all_ humans, really, really, _really_ hated monsters...

They didn't know, but as they sat with Lace, and fidgeted with a sparkly ribbon given to them by someone they'd never properly met, they felt sure that the human wouldn't have done what it did, if only it knew what monsters were like. If only...

* * *

Before, the doctor had told Cabbage they couldn't just lie in their bed and sleep all day; now they said they were making a mistake by leaving too soon. Cabbage listened politely, nodded, and ignored them.

By the time they reached home, they began to suspect that the doctor was right; the semi-healed seams in their exoskeleton screamed with pain until they wanted to curl up in a tiny ball and scream, too; Reaper Bird was literally and figuratively beside themselves, but their housemates stared, as if Cabbage hadn't been injured, but infected with something disfiguring and highly contagious. Cabbage ignored them, hugged Reaper Bird—wondering absently if they might get some horrible exotic malady from Amalgamate-goo leaching into their injuries—and limped of to the room they'd shared with Lace. Given that Reaper Bird somehow had even more reason to hate medical settings than the rest of their family, Cabbage wasn't sure how they would manage to entice their sibling back to the hospital even for the sake of seeing their youngest sibling, but if they waited too long... ...that would be... wrong. To leave them alone for too long.

Rummaging through the drawers for a new dress, ideally one that hadn't been stitched back together with cobwebs, Cabbage glanced up. The Froggits had all scattered, but one monster had followed them, and now loitered just outside.

"...Greetings, Aya," Cabbage said.

The Loox blinked at them and tried to find a safe path into the bedroom, but the floor was piled high with books, and, as Cabbage could attest, climbing over them was... not enjoyable. The Loox stayed where they were. "You're back, huh? You didn't tell anybody where you were goin', and then those doctors took, uhhhh, your sibling... so we all thought you... might've... yannow."

"No, I don't."

"Like. I heard ya went to the RUINS?"

Cabbage inspected a dress. If not for the bite marks around the sleeves—courtesy of Lace—it would be almost wearable. Except there were more marks around the collar, too. They sighed and put the dress back. Their body hurt. Their SOUL hurt. Everything hurt. Maybe the world was trying to send them a message. Maybe they should just...

"And that... some bad stuff happened."

"From whom did you hear this?"

"Ummmm. Around? These wizard guys... girls... whoever, Alphys asked them to help make new puzzles n' stuff with magic..." The Loox shrugged, tapping their claws together. "...and there was somethin' there. In the RUINS. That didn't want them there. And somebody following 'em, from outside, which, ummm, was you I guess probably."

How many people knew about what happened? Eurgh. Cabbage found a different dress wedged in the back of the drawer, old but good enough. They wished they still had their helmet to cover their face; without it, they felt terribly exposed. Speaking of which:

"Do you plan to watch while I undress, or..?"

"Do I... oh. Uh... uh... _Oh_."

The Loox pattered back and yanked the door shut after them. Cabbage grit their teeth and began the uncomfortable task of trying to change with as little physical movement as possible—plain bandages weren't as good as the magical kind—but they had no more than a few seconds of relative peace before the Loox shouted through the door: "_Did that stuff all happen? Yannow, in the RUINS?_"

"That is not a real word."

"_Huh?_"

"N-never mind." At the last moment, Cabbage remembered the ribbon and searched the pockets of their old dress until they found it. Not certain what else to do with it, but not wanting to leave it behind, they tied it around one antenna. It didn't make them feel particularly cute. "It's— it is true. More or less."

Reaper Bird made an electronic-sounding screech from another room as Cabbage clambered their way past the books and all but fell out of their room. They brushed themselves off, already snapping at the Loox in their head for laughing at them. But the Loox didn't laugh.

"Was it... uh... really Chara?"

"_What?_" Cabbage turned too sharply and doubled over, which just made it worse. "N-no, it... I don't know." They waved the Loox away when they tried to grab their arm. "Some... some sort of flower monster?"

"Uhhhh... you, you, you still kinda look... kinda... uh... like you shouldn't, uh... are you even s'posed to be here yet?"

"I h-have library books to return."

"If... you say so, I, uhhh... guess." The Loox glanced around. "We coulda done that for you. If you, uhhhh, if you wanted." They almost sounded concerned. Cabbage wasn't sure why. They'd never given them any _reason_ to be concerned about their well-being.

"SThodReoiimobberoitdRiunbbmeit'bs ahersse," Reaper Bird said. As their voices trailed off into static, there was a knock at the front door.

"Uhhh... should I...?"

Cabbage shook their head, forcing themselves to straighten up. "I will answer it."

Reaper Bird gurgled again as Cabbage approached the door; their voices sounded close, but it seemed they were hiding somewhere out of sight. Cabbage sighed. Unless the person at the door was the queen herself, here to deliver a whole bottle of, what was it named, Determination, they were not going to enjoy this any more than they'd enjoyed being interrogated by a monster who they'd mostly ignored for the past several months. A mistake, perhaps; if it was possible to go back and change things, maybe they would have tried harder to be friendly. It would have been the nicer thing to do. But, well, now it was too late. For a lot of things.

_Oh, well..._

They answered the door.


	3. Alternating Current

For such a dreaded condition, Falling Down was a boring way to die.

Funny. Lace had always been afraid of everything a monster could possibly think to be afraid of—bullies from school and mercenaries from the edges of the city and loud noises and deep water and fires and horrible diseases and the possibility of the Core exploding, and the human coming back and murdering them, or worse, murdering everyone _except_ them, leaving them to rot alone in a pit of dust. But now they were completely helpless, immobile, and dying, and they weren't scared at all. Just _bored_. At least if the human killed them, it would all be over in an instant.

Cabbage would scold them if they knew they were thinking these morbid thoughts. There'd been a time when they understood each other perfectly, when they both had all the same fears. But somehow, after the human killed all their friends and all the monsters who could protect them, Asgore and Undyne and the entire royal guard, Cabbage stopped being afraid. And Lace... didn't. So now, here they both were. One of them was doomed, and one of them wasn't. Maybe Cabbage had the right idea all along.

Their older siblings came and went. Cabbage kept pushing piles of books around and noisily leafing through them and trying to use green magic on Lace, while Reaper Bird hovered over the bed and gibbered with three voices. Cabbage went out and didn't come back, and in the quiet they left behind, Lace could hear the other monsters that lived in their house all nervously murmuring. Lace would have shuddered if they could.

Reaper Bird gurgled and hummed somewhere nearby. Lace relaxed a little.

They wondered where their other sibling had gone. It seemed like they were trying to get help, but Lace didn't know where they thought they could find it. Monsters always died once they Fell Down. Except Reaper Bird and the slushy snow lady and those other monsters, but they were special cases. Alphys wasn't going to bother helping anyone like _Lace_. She had better ways to spend her time.

The door squeaked like someone was looking in, but Reaper Bird said something that sounded like _go away_ and _don't push it_ and a frog's croak. The other monster left.

Lace wished they could thank them, or say they were sorry. They'd always caused problems for everyone, breaking things and needing too much attention and being even worse at talking than Reaper Bird, and now there was _this_.

Eventually, even being angry at themselves got old. They wished they could read a book, even one of Cabbage's horrible doorstoppers. They would go back to school, _gladly_, just for a chance to do anything at all. They couldn't even remember what day it was, or how much time had passed since they first realized that they couldn't move. Cabbage still hadn't come home. Where did their sibling go? They liked having Reaper Bird with them, but if they left then _both_ of their siblings would be gone and they would be alone with the frogs in their house, unable to move or run away or fly... not that it would've mattered, if they were just going to die soon anyway, one way or another.

Lace waited. There wasn't anything for them to do except wait, until night fell and the house went quiet and the world went soft and dreamy around the edges. Their big sibling never came back.

* * *

Pinch.

A needle. Someone's arm. Whose? Fuzzy. The arm felt cool and damp where the needle had gone in. Something swabbed over it, like a tongue. A sharp scent. Disinfectant? Definitely not a tongue. Hopefully.

The arm tingled. Pins and needles. Mostly needles. The place where the needle had gone in now radiated a phantom heat, a tingling sensation that crawled down to the fingertips and up to the shoulder and throughout the rest of the body. Their weakened SOUL thudded, and almost hurt, like something was burrowing inside it, something _alive_, but there wasn't time to be horrified by the thought because then nothing hurt and their SOUL just felt warm too, warm and strong. Even if it had hurt, that wouldn't have mattered, even if it was damaged—even if it was supposed to die, it wasn't going to break. It wanted to live. More than they'd ever wanted anything, _they_ wanted to live, wanted to go on existing, wanted to... to... to...

* * *

Lace opened their eyes.

Panic flooded through them when they didn't recognize their surroundings, but then the warmth in their SOUL sent out soft tendrils all through their body, whispering reassurances and erasing the chill of fear before it could take hold. Calm now, they looked dreamily around, though there wasn't much to take in. A ceiling, and walls, and yellowish light spilling in from outside. It was nice and dim, this little room.

Their exoskeleton practically creaked from disuse as they turned their head. A monster had pulled up a chair to their bedside and fallen asleep there, fuzzy head pillowed on one arm. Lace smiled at their big sibling, waited for them to notice what had just changed, but Cabbage snored on, oblivious. Lace swallowed, the soothing sense of well-being in their SOUL dimming for an instant. "Um." They tried to whisper. "Um." Their mouth moved and air passed through their throat, but if any noise escaped, Cabbage didn't hear it. "...Uh?"

That wasn't going to work. Lace tried to sit up. _Tried_, except that all they had to do was think about wanting to move, and then they were upright, their paper gown crinkling. Their wings felt stiff from being folded in one position for too long, but they just rustled them and rolled their shoulders and then they felt fine, _better_ than fine. They went to scratch one antenna and noticed a thin plastic tube taped to their hand, which they promptly forgot as they crawled to the edge of the bed. They giggled silently.

Lace rested their hands on the railing at the side of the bed, planning to tap on it until their sleepy sibling finally noticed, but they changed their mind at the last instant and pushed off instead, fluttering their wings. Once. _Once_, except that then they were hurtling toward their sibling like somebody had thrown them. They slammed into Cabbage and latched on tight while Cabbage screeched in terror and then screeched louder as they bounced off the arm of the chair and rolled together across the floor in a tangle of arms and legs and wings and tubes. Lace felt a painful twinge in their hand, and liquid trickling over their wrist, and then the steady electronic _beep-beep-beep_-ing from the machine at their bedside (which they hadn't even noticed until just then) screeched even louder than Cabbage: _**BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!**_

Lace squished their face into the front of Cabbage's dress and at the same time tried to cover their ears, while their sibling tried to struggle free, hyperventilating. The lights flicked on and clomping footsteps rushed in, and a gravelly voice was saying something but Lace couldn't pay attention to whatever was being said, the machine was too loud. Finally, the shrieking machine stopped. Lace's ears rang, and the dangling IV tube dripped clear liquid on the floor.

Cabbage, trying to shield their face, was babbling a panicked mantra of _letgoletgoletgoletgo_._letgoletgoletgoletgoletgoletgoletgoletgo._ Lace let go and scooted away, confused, taking refuge in the shadowy spot under the chair while a weathered stone gargoyle looked down at them both.

"Cabbage?" he started to ask. "What have you... ...oh. My."

They made a wheezy sound. Lace peeked out from under the chair, and didn't know why the gargoyle was giving them shocked-and-then-happy kind of look, or who he even was, but it felt like he wasn't there to hurt him and even if he wanted to, he couldn't, so they waved hello. While they were looking upward, Cabbage gasped something and then pounced on them, yanking them into a tight hug. Nobody screamed, this time.

"You're _awake!_" Cabbage hugged Lace so hard that their arms were smushed into their sides. They knew without trying that they could've broken Cabbage's grip if they wanted to, but they didn't really need their arms right now, so they just rested their head on their big sibling's shoulder. "Th-they said that you might never... that it might, that even the queen didn't know if... ...but I KNEW you w-would..." they sniffled. "I knew it, I _did_..."

The doctor knelt next to them, gemstone eyes glowing green with magic, though Lace wasn't sure why since they weren't hurt. They felt as far from hurt as possible, like nothing _could_ have hurt them, even if it tried.

…But their sibling wasn't so lucky. Lace had not noticed at first, but as they looked down at their sibling's back, they couldn't see their wings, only bandages. They squirmed back and frowned up at their sibling, pointing around to the bandages. Cabbage just shook their head and smiled, a little wanly now, and patted Lace's head.

"Don't worry about that. I can tell you everything later, I promise, but it's all right now. It doesn't matter."

* * *

The doctors and nurses said it was _just to be safe_, and Cabbage kept reassuring them that they would leave the hospital any day now—even as they brought Lace their pajamas and notebook and more books than they could have read in a month—but Lace knew the real reason why they weren't allowed to go home. They'd been injected with Determination. Their oldest sibling was a big gooey moth-eyeball-frog-bird. They knew how this worked.

The day after they accidentally tackled Cabbage, another monster woke up, and then another, and then the doctor told them they would all be moving to their own floor of the hospital, along with a steady trickle of other monsters that were returning to life; beetles and crickets, and little birds, and a fluffy cloud, and a paper airplane, and a pair of white rats. The rats invited them to hang out in their room while the cloud and paper airplane chased each other around the ceilings, and Lace began to feel like they were in the middle of a giant sleepover. Except that nobody knew when they could go home, and there were nurses anxiously checking their SOULs ten times a day, and they were all banned from touching each other in case they turned unstable and melted together.

It was noisy, but Lace was never alone, which somewhat made up for only having one of their siblings around during visiting hours. Cabbage told them about the flower and how they'd lost their wings, and the story made Lace want to hate themselves for being the reason why their sibling got hurt. But their SOUL hummed in their chest, new and strong like it had been transplanted there from some other Lace, a better one, and _that_ Lace wasn't sorry. It wasn't like they'd _told_ Cabbage to go following after Alphys into the RUINS, and even if they had, well, it led to Alphys deciding to help save their life, using Determination nobody even knew she possessed. Now Lace was happy, as long as they didn't dwell too long on what they might look like by the time they got to go home, and Cabbage was (mostly) happy, and Reaper Bird was happy. Why should they feel bad? This was the good outcome. The best possible outcome.

Wasn't it?

* * *

The queen visited as soon as she heard that they'd woken up.

Lace had taken refuge in the lab with Cabbage when the human attacked, but they never saw Alphys for long, or up close. She was too busy running in and out, herding along the stragglers who hadn't heard about the evacuation or were too scared to move, while Lace was, well, _also_ too scared to move. They'd spent the whole time huddled with their sibling and waiting for it to be over, one way or the other.

Which meant that they'd never realized just how _pretty_ she was.

Lace was so absorbed in staring at the queen's eyelashes that they barely noticed when she started speaking. "Can I sit here?"

A nurse hovered in the hallway, watching Alphys curiously before moving on. Lace nodded distantly, their belly filled with a funny fluttering feeling while Alphys pulled up the chair Cabbage had been sleeping in during their vigil.

"Your name is Lace, right?" she asked. "I've heard a lot about you from your sibling."

A lot? A lot of _what?_ What had Cabbage said, and was it bad? How bad? Their older sibling could be kind of grouchy and they liked to complain about the tiniest things, but they wouldn't embarrass themselves in front of the queen if they could help it, so maybe Lace was safe. Or were they?

The collar of their pajamas squished between their teeth. Alphys gave them a funny look, which just made them more nervous, which made them bite down harder on the fuzzy fabric.

"...Um... is everything okay?"

They nodded, shrinking down shyly. Cabbage usually stepped in to rescue them at moments like these, but the doctor had already shooed them away for the evening. Avoiding her eyes, they felt around for their notebook. When they risked a glance up and realized she was still waiting for an answer, they held up their pen and pointed at the paper.

"Do you... just not like to talk very much?"

Lace shrugged. Alphys opened her mouth to say something, seemed to change her mind, then said instead: "...Okay! Um, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with writing or, um, whatever." She watched them turn to a new page, picking at her claw. "I just wanted to come meet you guys, since... well, in your case, you probably know way more about Determination than most people, because of Reaper Bird. But I wanted to give everyone a chance to ask about it, if they want, or... anything else, I guess."

The top of their pajamas felt cold and wet and clingy against their neck as they switched to chewing their pen cap. They wrote a question.

_am i going to be like r.b._

"I don't know how much you've been told about... everything. That led up to this." She was looking at her hands, wringing them in her lap like _she_ was the one who had any reason to be nervous. "You'll probably hear about it from your friends, if you haven't already. But, basically I kind of made some... really bad choices. And I wanted to do everything I could to fix it now, wh-which includes making sure that you guys are all okay. And... also... I w-wanted to apologize to all of you."

The plastic cracked. Lace quietly spit out the pen cap and hid it behind their pillow, and scribbled out their question until there was nothing but an indented smear of blue ink across the page. Underneath, they drew a question mark, and turned the notebook around for Alphys to see.

"For... waiting so long to help you. I told everyone that I couldn't help, and I told your sibling that I couldn't, because I thought that it wasn't... um... it wasn't that I didn't WANT to, but... it was kind of complicated, and... p-probably you don't care at all, anyway, so my reasoning is beside the point. I waited longer than I should have, and it... almost ended really badly for you. It looks like it didn't, but it could have, and... I'm sorry. You deserve better than that. All of you do. I wish you had somebody better to help you, but until someone decides to take me out, y-you're kind of stuck with me, so... ahhh... here we are, eheheheh."

Her last few words came out in a rush, giggly and breathless, but her smile was hollow. Lace slid the collar of their pajamas (now ripping apart at the seam) back into their mouth.

Down the hall, a cricket chirped.

Alphys fidgeted. "A-anyway... I hope this wasn't weird, or, um... just me rambling. Even if I kind of was. S-so, just... if you need, ahh, help, or... if something's not okay, I want to... try and do whatever I can to help fix that, if it's possible. That makes sense, right?"

Why was the queen asking _them_ if what she said had made sense? Lace didn't share their sibling's goofy fixation on knights and honor and royalty, but she was still the _queen_. She was smarter than fifty Laces put together, and more important than they ever would be. And... she also just happened to have smooth, soft-looking yellow scales, the exact color they'd always imagined sunshine might have.

Lace nodded vigorously, until Alphys giggled and gave their head a pat. It always felt a little condescending when Cabbage did that, but now they felt a pang of disappointment when she took her hand away.

"I should let you rest now, since it's a little late," she apologized, as she got up to leave. Lace waved for her to stop, scribbling a new note and holding it up.

_thank you for saving my family._

Alphys smiled, for real this time, like Lace had just said something really wonderful. But her eyes were still tired, and looked just as tired after the smile faded. She picked at a scale on one hand.

"Just… one more thing," she said. "Um. Think of it as, um, life advice, or something." She noticed what she was doing and quickly tugged her sleeve down, clasping her hands behind her back. "Don't... ever lie to people. Or, no—I mean... I guess... maybe there are times where you can't just blab about everything, like maybe if you NEED to keep something a secret, but... don't hide the truth from people just because you're afraid of what they'll think. Especially if they're people you love. Because... it took me way too long to learn that lesson, and by the time I did, I'd already hurt two people I r-really really cared about. So. Uh. Don't do that."

* * *

As Lace rested in their cot that night, they heard the nurses whispering outside, in the hallway by the desk, far enough enough that they must have thought no one could hear them. They didn't sound happy. Lace didn't know why.

The next morning, they looked around at the other awakened monsters as if for the first time. They'd never noticed it, and they'd never thought about it, but most of the other monsters were only a few years older than Lace, and none were any bigger than the rats. All of them small, and light. The kinds of monsters, maybe, that would only need a little Determination to wake up. Unlike the stone monsters and dragons and other big monsters they'd seen on the upper floor, where all the comatose monsters slept.

* * *

Lace went home.

They hugged Reaper Bird and waved hello to Aya the Loox and gave the Froggits friendly pats on the head, leaving them mystified and slightly sticky. (Maybe touching Reaper Bird should have been the last thing they did.)

Afterward, Cabbage looked at them differently—like they had mutated into some other kind of monster. Lace studied themselves in the bathroom mirror, but apart from the ragged spots on their wings where the delicate chitin had partially dissolved into dust while they were unconscious, nothing looked different. They hadn't melted. _Nobody_ melted, except for the fluffy cloud, who turned into a sad puddle for a day and then back into a happy cloud, and Lace was pretty sure that was normal.

By the time Lace was released from the hospital, Cabbage didn't have to wear bandages anymore, and Alphys had already fulfilled her promise of making them a new pair of wings. She'd offered to make Cabbage's new wings look however they wanted—colorful and butterfly-like, or long and elegant like a dragonfly's wings, or even fluffy and feathery like a bird's—but they'd wanted wings that looked almost exactly like the old ones, sparkly and delicate, with only the straps holding them in place and their faintly reflective, metallic surface betraying the fact that Cabbage hadn't been born with them.

The two siblings sat perched on the roof of their home, watching as other monsters passed along the street below, unaware. Cabbage kept fluttering their wings, flaring them out and folding them, craning their neck to see. The not-quite-natural buzz from the battery pack made Lace want to do to it what they'd done to Cabbage's cell phone when it wouldn't stop ringing, but they thought Cabbage might be a little unhappy about that, so they resisted. Instead they tried to focus on their big sibling's happy chattering—about Alphys and how smart she was, and how the wings were supposed to be incredibly strong, and what they could all do together now that Lace was back, and—ugh—school. But always they seemed to circle back around to the queen.

Lace tapped their heels lightly against the shingles, thinking about their own meeting with Alphys. After a while, they scribbled out a question and slid their notebook over to Cabbage.

_is alphys ok?_

"That should be capitalized. And what do you mean?"

_IS ALPHYS__ OK?_

"That isn't what I meant."

Lace ignored them and kept writing. _i met her too and she seemed sad._

"Ugh. ...When was this?"

_hospital_.

"Many monsters have reason to feel sad. And... few of them have a more difficult job than hers."

_she said she hurt her friends. did they go away because they were mad? will they come back soon?_

"Er..." Cabbage stopped moving their new wings, to Lace's relief. The hum of the monsters in the street below rose up to fill what would otherwise have been quiet. Maybe it was the Determination, or maybe their time in an eternally noisy hospital had left them desensitized, but the sound didn't stress Lace out anymore. "Perhaps... maybe. It, hm..."

Lace nibbled the corner of their notebook's page. Cabbage shook their head.

"...Are you aware of what else was done with the Determination, before the queen chose to help us?"

Lace nodded, swallowing the strip of paper they held hamster-like in their cheek. They'd heard rumors from other monsters in the hospital, mostly older teenagers anxious to find out what they'd missed on something-net while they were comatose. Everyone seemed to _sort of _know what happened to Cabbage in the RUINS—much to their sibling's embarrassment—even if the details were wrong. There was a skeleton named Sans who was friends with Alphys, but had disappeared, and even she said she didn't know where he went. And there was another monster, whose life she'd saved with Determination, though she'd been careful to avoid saying who they were, or where they were.

_she helped her friend who fell down before anyone else. and her friend sans is missing._

"Sort of. I... believe." Cabbage looked away, clearing their throat. When they got uncomfortable, they either started talking even _more_ like an old person, or they just got noisy and upset and flustered. There wasn't much of an in-between. "I asked about his whereabouts, once. She said that... Undyne was the only monster that knows."

Lace tilted their head. Even _they_ weren't so isolated that they didn't know about Undyne. They'd always thought she looked scary, but there were plenty of kids at their school who more or less aspired to _be_ her when they grew up. She was gone, though—not gone like Sans was gone, though, and not Fallen Down. The human killed her.

Cabbage lowered their voice, as if anyone could hear them up on the roof. "I did not ask what she meant, but... before then, when you had just Fallen Down, I saw... _a_ monster, down in the queen's laboratory. It... it did not look like anyone I recognized, and I was afraid to... I thought that Sans would help, so I... never had the _chance_ to help, even if, if I _had_ realized..."

Lace had to prod their sibling in the ribs to make them look at their notebook. _undynes alive?_

Cabbage instinctively twitched, but didn't comment on their grammar. "It... is possible. I assume she is no longer in the laboratory, but... I do not know anything else," they said. "...This goes without saying, but... this information should not be shared."

Lace looked down at the words they had written. Alphys had told them it wasn't good to lie or hide the truth, especially not to anyone they cared about. And here was their sibling, telling them to do the opposite. Did that rule work in the opposite direction—was it okay to hide something if they were _told_ to do it? Not that they had much of an opportunity to tell anyone anything, when everything they "said" was through a notebook.

They scratched their antenna, and thought, and wrote one more question, one that seemed a little safer.

_do i NEED to go back to school...?_

* * *

So there it was. A dilemma with what seemed to Lace like a simple solution.

Undyne, who had been friends with Alphys, was supposedly alive somehow. Sans... well, no one said he was _dead_, but no one seemed to know where he was, except for Undyne, who was also unaccounted-for, and seemingly unaware that her friend Alphys was sad and lonely.

After everything the queen did to reunite Lace and their siblings, it seemed only fair that they should try to return the favor. Then she wouldn't be so lonely, and Undyne would be happier, probably, and Sans... well, they didn't know anything about him, but if they could find him, maybe they could help him, too. And then all three of them would be happy again. That seemed right—reuniting Alphys and her two friends in exchange for saving three siblings. Lace wasn't a very strong or smart or special sort of monster, even with Determination, but they thought they could accomplish that much.

All they had to do was find Undyne.


	4. Lacuna

Now that they shared each other's memories, and now that enough time had passed for him to look back on them with some degree of objectivity, Sans had to give Undyne credit. Learning to signal to him whenever Alphys wasn't looking, then saying just enough to pique his interest and get him to open up to her, even if she couldn't get him to open the _tank_ and let her out, then going back and using her knowledge of the photo to get him into the lab more easily, then luring him close enough to grab... Sans couldn't tell if that had been her plan all along, or if she'd just brute-forced her way to a solution, but it was impressive work for a monster with a brain turned to mush. A really well-executed murder.

He felt a wave of malicious glee that wasn't his own.

_**How does it feel, knowing that I could outsmart you even THEN?**_

_feels fluffy,_ Sans thought back.

_**...What?**_

_hey, speaking of which... want me to recite 'fluffy bunny goes to the park' again? i know how much you loved it last time._

With the mental equivalent of a growl, she disengaged, leaving Sans floating alone in the murky nowhere-space of their shared mind.

Out in the physical world where their body lived, Undyne was dragging a big crate out of storage in the back of Gerson's shop. As much as she used to hate sliding block puzzles and anything that resembled them, it was weirdly soothing to push boxes around. Gerson didn't mind that she avoided letting other monsters see her, and he didn't pressure her into any conversation topics deeper than _what was in there again? _ or _yep, that one goes back into storage_, so she was free to zone out and work until her atrophied muscles ached. When she wasn't picking on Sans, or getting tortured by him, she liked to think about all the times she'd slaughtered Frisk.

If Sans wanted to make a power grab, now would be a good time. He tried to imagine what he'd do, if he managed to wrestle control away from Undyne. Scream for help? What would he even say? _"Help, help, this is Undyne's inner skeleton speaking, get me outta here"?_

_**Go ahead and try it, Sans.**_

_yeah, yeah..._

_**I'll CRUSH you.**_

It was an empty threat. They both knew it.

Their thoughts overlapped, melded, and repelled each other like water and grease. Undyne shambled through Gerson's shop, staying close to the wall in case she forgot which way was up; Sans hid himself deep in their mind, crawled into an imaginary box and pulled the lid shut after him, and whispered the words to that dumb picture book about the bunny. It helped block out Undyne's daydreams of gutting their former friend.

* * *

Sans used to take pride in his ability to adapt, but this was... a lot. Even for him.

While Undyne stumbled around Waterfall in search of her childhood hero, Sans panicked. Kept wanting to scream for help like a little babybones. And that was pretty embarrassing, even if Undyne was the only person who could hear him.

But he got used to it. All she'd wanted was a shortcut out of her prison, and now that she was free, she wanted to be able to string a sentence together. She had no interest in snooping through memories of people and places she'd never seen; she just wanted his vocabulary. His knowledge of what her name was, and what she was supposed to look like. Once Sans realized that, it got easier to cope with being an Amalgamate, or whatever the hell they'd become. Not easy. Just easier.

Now that he was calm enough to get all weird and contemplative, he wondered sometimes if this was how it felt to be... shattered. He still existed, by some generous definition of the word, but he was disembodied, detached from the world. He could think, he could observe the physical world, but he wasn't _there_. He couldn't interact with anything, anyone, so the world just went right on without him. Was this..?

Whatever. Didn't matter. He was okay.

And there were some upsides to this new existence. Not having a physical body was a great excuse for doing nothing, and that was extra-convenient since he officially never needed to go into the workshop again.

Determination... that special power Frisk and the flower and Undyne all shared... that ability to change fate...

With somebody else's Determination flowing through him, Sans _remembered_ now.

Undyne ignored him, most of the time. She slept, and stared at the wall, and tried to piece herself back together. And while his "partner" was busy with existing in the physical world, Sans dug through their memories of the other world, the one where that photo had come from. The world that didn't exist anymore.

* * *

_A girl with magenta pigtails was trying to carve swear words into a tree with her claws. Sans watched for a while, admiring her handiwork, before speaking up._ _"hey, did frisk pass by here recently?"_

_"Eh?" the girl grunted, digging a splinter out of her hand. "Yeah. They went that way."_

_"thanks."_

_Sans strolled across the playground, past the trees and the slide and the tetherball pole. The sky was that pale, unbroken gray that signaled rain and good napping weather; it was too late in the year for blooming flowers, but_ _the air was clean and crisp as only the air in Ebott could be. There were cities half a day's drive away where you still had to wear masks in the summer, and the Underground, well... even without smog, it was still literally underground._

_He found Frisk waiting at the swingset by the back fences, their sneakers dragging through the dirt and wood chips._

_"hey, kid, want some free candy?"_

_Frisk looked up at him through their shaggy bangs, the corner of their mouth twitching._

_"well, whatever. i guess trying to keep up with you qualifies as exercise." Sans plopped down on the swing next to Frisk. "what did you want to talk about, anyway?"_

_Frisk shrugged, kicking listlessly at the wood chips. Off at the other end of the playground, Pigtail Girl was still doing her thing. Sans hummed, watching the dry leaves tumble across the ground with the wind._

_"you seemed real anxious to leave as soon as undyne showed up this morning," he prompted. "you kinda just... bolted. are you upset with her?"_

_After a long pause to think, they shook their head. Sans had a feeling they weren't being completely truthful, but he let it go._

_"is something else bothering you? we don't _have_ to talk about it, but you did wake me up for this, so i'm assuming that you wanted to."_

_They nodded. There was something._

_"ok, go for it."_

_They took a deep breath._

_Sometimes, they said, it felt like Sans was their only true friend. That was why they didn't want to stick around long enough for Undyne to talk to them, or for their mom to ask where they were going. He was the only person they could trust. That was how it felt. Sometimes._

_"that's... kinda flattering, i guess, but c'mon, kid. papyrus adores you, he'd be heartbroken if he knew you'd said that. everyone—"_

_They hadn't finished._

_Sometimes, it felt like they couldn't even trust Sans. He was their only friend from the Underground who never hurt them, but he also never did anything to stop the ones who did. He'd made a... certain promise, to a certain monster... but he never kept it, no matter how much danger they were in._

_Frisk looked down at their feet, at the sneakers that seemed too big for their skinny, gangly legs. Their words sounded rehearsed_ _, like they'd been repeating in the kid's mind for days—which, maybe, they had. Sans thought back to how quiet they'd been lately, and how he'd shrugged it off as worry over starting high school, or something like that._

_Sans didn't know what to say. "have you... uh... really been keeping this bottled up all this time?" He scratched the back of his skull. "'cause that, that can't be healthy."_

_Frisk's mouth was a firm, flat line. Their hard expression reminded him a little of their mom, when she got annoyed._

_"that 'promise' stuff... i told you all about it back then. tori asked me, and i didn't have any idea that a human would ACTUALLY fall into the underground. then you came along, and, well, i didn't know you as well as i do now. i didn't know what kind of person you were, deep down, or if i could trust you."_

_They were a kid. They were still a kid, now._

_"yeah. a human kid. not that it— that isn't a strike against you, like, as a person, but realistically, it makes a difference," said Sans._ _He looked out across the yard to see if that girl was still around. Seemed like she'd left. He lowered his voice anyway. "...you had the power to hurt a lot of people, if you'd wanted. regardless of your age."_

_Frisk was quiet for a while. Raindrops spattered across the dirt while they mulled over his answer, their hands curled around the chains on the swing._

_Could he have killed them, like he'd said he would have if not for Toriel, back at the MTT resort?_ _He made it sound like it'd be easy, but..._

_"this is getting kinda morbid, don't you think?" Sans chuckled uneasily. "that was years ago..."_

_He was dodging the question. How strong was he?_

_"not very. heh heh... c'mon, kid. you know me, i'm no fighter," Sans said. Sheesh, if he'd known Frisk was planning on a cross-examination here, he would've stayed in bed. "though, if you're still mad about what i said, then, uh... sorry, i guess."_

_Frisk nodded, expression inscrutable. They pushed off the ground, swung a little, then dragged their feet to a stop._

_Just as they opened their mouth to speak, the front gate opened, and Papyrus strode into the playground, leading Yuuya along by the hand. Frisk's posture changed in an instant, pulling inward, timid and stiff like they were ten years old again. Sans let out a silent sigh of relief._

_"THERE YOU ARE!" Papyrus called out. _

_It took Yuuya a minute longer to figure out what was going on—their pink goggle-glasses were all fogged up from the humidity—but then they let go of Papyrus' glove and scampered over as quickly as their little feet would go. "Hi Fif!" they lisped, falling against the human kid's leg and grabbing on with both pudgy arms._

_"hey, bro. kiddo."_

_"UNDYNE SAID SHE SAW YOU GOING THIS WAY. DID YOU GUYS COME TO THE PARK TO HELP WALK THE BABY?" Papyrus asked._

_Frisk smiled weakly at the toddler attached to their leg, then looked over to Sans for help. He scooped Yuuya up; they whined at first, then spotted his hoodie string and went after it like a tiny piranha. Poor kid was almost three and still teething. If they were anything like Undyne, that wasn't going to stop any time... well... ever._

_"isn't that your job, papyrus?" Sans asked. While he was still leaning in close to Frisk, he whispered: "if you'd rather be alone right now, you can bail out."_

_"INDEED! WHICH IS WHY I, AS THEIR SURROGATE MOTHER, DECIDED THAT THEY SHOULD EMBRACE THEIR AQUATIC HERITAGE AND PLAY IN THE RAIN TODAY!" Papyrus announced, then scratched his skull. "...WAIT, WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING AWAKE AT THIS HOUR, SANS?"_

_"well, i figure that the earlier i get up, the sooner i can take a nap."_

_"WOW! THAT'S BIZARRELY ALMOST RESPONSIBLE OF YOU, BROTHER! HOWEVER—"_

_Frisk gnawed the inside of their cheek, then jumped off the swing and walked off in the other direction, their head down. He heard the fence rattle._

_Yuuya peeked over his shoulder, his hoodie string stuffed in their mouth. "Mmmnph?"_

_"...HUH? WHERE ARE THEY GOING?"_

_"eh. home, maybe. wouldn't wanna catch a cold from the rain." Sans poked Yuuya's cheek to make them spit out the half of his hoodie string they'd bitten off. It didn't work. "...what were you about to say?"_

_Papyrus was definitely still concerned, but (gently) scolding his brother took priority over a lot of things. "I KNOW FOR A FACT THAT YOU DIDN'T TAKE YOUR MEDICINE THIS MORNING, SANS!"_

_"oh, yeah, right."_

_Papyrus huffed, putting his hands on his hip-bones. Toriel had pushed Sans into seeing some human doctors, but his brother was the one who took it upon himself to make sure Sans actually did was he was told, mostly. _ _With an extra two hit points to his name than he'd had Underground, he couldn't complain too much._

_"HONESTLY, YOU'D FORGET YOUR OWN SKULL IF YOU DIDN'T HAVE ME HERE TO REMIND YOU OF THESE THINGS! IF YOU WANT YOUR BONES TO BE STRONG, YOU NEED TO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF! THAT'S RULE NUMBER ONE OF BEING A GOOD SKELETON!"_

_"i mean. technically you could take perfect care of yourself and not be a skeleton. like, think of a slime monster."_

_"...MAYBE! SO BE LIKE A SLIME MONSTER AND TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOUR BONES! THAT'S RULE NUMBER TWO!"_

_"yeah, that makes sense." Sans set Yuuya back down. They started wobbling back over to Papyrus, then got distracted halfway and wandered off to stick their hands in a nearby mud puddle. "welp... guess i'd better head home, then, too."_

_"GOOD! AND MAKE SURE THAT FRISK ALSO—TINY MONSTER, NO, WAIT!"_

_Papyrus snatched Yuuya up. They giggled, spit out the string in their mouth, then switched to trying to gnaw on his scarf. Sans slid off his swing._

_"heh heh... yeah, ok. i'll look after them."_

* * *

_**That's it? They befriended everyone, broke the barrier, lived on the surface for all those years, THEN decided they were so mad at us for killing them that they turned into a murderous freak, went back in time, and tried to kill off monsterkind?**_

_i mean, we went home after that and talked about... socks, i think. so... make of that what you will._

_**That's ridiculous.**_

_you're right. socks are toe-tally important._

_**Yeah, Sans, nothing's more hilarious than a human murdering my baby for no reason.**_

_it isn't funny. i never suggested—_

_**How about when it killed your brother? Do you even care about that? What about all the other kids? Did any of THEM matter?**_

_i care._

_**Just like you said you cared about me, then left me to rot in Alphys' basement. But, hey, what does any of this matter, right? YOU were never in danger, because YOU never lifted a finger to stop them. And even when you did seek Frisk out in New Home, they never touched YOU.**_

_how is that my fault?_

_**Why didn't you try to stop them?**_

_i thought they'd already stopped._

_**THEY KILLED EVERYONE. THEY KILLED ASGORE. THEY TOOK THE SOULS.**_

_that isn't what i... yeah. but i thought they'd... i thought they were gonna go back, maybe. it seemed like there was a turning point. there was nothing i could do._

_**That's an**_ _**excuse.**_

_was i completely wrong? that one time, when you were trying to stop them... they could've killed you, but they didn't._

_**...So WHAT? **_

_they ALMOST killed you, then they stopped, and then you killed them. and they freaked out._

_**What the hell was I SUPPOSED to do? Just give up and die there and hope they randomly changed their mind and decided to be nice? Just because they hesitated before trying to kill ME, but not ANYBODY ELSE, just that ONCE? If they felt so bad, why didn't they actually stop? They could TIME TRAVEL. They could've fixed everything. They could've jumped off that bridge and been DONE with it. Or if they really were so mad about getting killed, back when they still acted like some softhearted little wimp, and they wanted revenge that badly, they could've only taken it out on the people who actually hurt them.**_

_yeah, i don't disagree with you._

_**You're trying to defend them. Traitor.**_

_i'm not defending them. nothing they did was morally justifiable._

_**Then what made you think they had some kind of change of heart before they got to Asgore? And even if they did regret their actions, how would that explain why they decided to take everything away from us in the first place?**_

_i don't think that. i don't... i don't even know. i don't get what they did._

_**Frisk was our enemy all along. They always were, even though we never knew it. They lied to all of us.**_

_they did._

_**So stop trying to give them some... some kind of sympathetic motive.**_

_i'm furious at them, too._

_**You don't act like it.**_

_i am. i just... i don't even know anymore. you're probably right. their actions make no sense._

_**Even if they did...**_

_...knowing the truth wouldn't bring anybody back._

_**No. It wouldn't.**_


	5. Déraciné

Lace tore a page from their notebook and crushed it into a ball, bouncing it in their hand. Cabbage was so concerned with straightening the ribbon around their antenna that they paid no attention to what was happening behind them. Until the paper thwapped off their head, bounced between a pile of books, and rolled under the dresser.

"Ouch!" Cabbage rubbed the back of their head as if it really hurt. Grumbling, they snatched up the paper ball and looked at what was written inside. "...No, this is not a '_date_'!"

Lace smiled sweetly and held up their notebook so Cabbage could read its reflection. _!ЯAI⅃_

"I _told_ you, I am only planning to... go and meet someone who... was kind to me when I was recovering in the hospital. That is _not_ a _date_."

Cabbage saw the next paper ball coming and ducked. It bounced off the mirror and hit them anyway.

_that __sounds__ like a date. yay cabbage!_

They wadded the note back up and tossed it aside. "It doesn't! What would you know about romance, anyway?"

Out of mercy—less for Cabbage and more for their notebook—Lace stopped tearing out pages, holding up their message instead. _if u dont like them, why cant i come too?_

"I don't _like_ them. I can't like a person I've never met... even if their writing is nicer than yours," Cabbage sniffed. "Honestly, Lace. I don't know what's gotten into you..."

_is your new friend cute?_

"N—I _didn't—LACE!"_

Lace giggled silently and zipped out to the kitchen, leaving Cabbage to finish preening in peace. Two Froggits were trying to get a jar of peanut butter open, a process that involved one trying to hold it steady and the other biting at the lid. Lace would've offered to help, but the frogs seemed to find their new, friendly behavior even more mystifying than their big sibling did, as if they suspected Lace was trying to play some inexplicable trick on them.

Cabbage had left one of their books on the table. Lace turned to a random page.

"_Rymenhild, that swete thing, / Wakede of hire swoghning. / 'Horn,' quath heo, 'wel sone / That schal beon idone. / Thu schalt beo dubbed knight / Are come seve night. / Have her this cuppe / And this ryng ther uppe / To Aylbrus the stuard, / And se he holde foreward. / Seie ich him biseche, / With loveliche speche, / That he adun falle / Bifore the king in halle, / And bidde the king aright / Dubbe thee to knighte. / With selver and with golde / Hit wurth him wel iyolde. / Crist him lene spede / Thin erende to bede.' / Horn tok his leve, / For hit was negh eve. / Athelbrus he soghte / And yaf him that he broghte, / And tolde him ful yare / Hu he hadde ifare, / And sede him his nede, / And bihet him his mede..._"

Their eyes glazed over, and they wondered if it was possible to be illiterate and not realize they were illiterate. Their grades at school were okay, but maybe their teacher just went easy on them out of pity.

In the time it took to finish the rest of the page, Cabbage finally emerged from their room. Lace lowered the book just enough to peek over its edge.

"I'll return... later," they said, checking the title along the book's spine before nodding in approval. "At least you're doing _something_ positive with your time. Until I come back... just behave, won't you?"

Lace flashed a thumbs up.

As soon as Cabbage left, one of the Froggits croaked in dismay as the peanut butter rolled into the sink. Lace put down the book, retrieved the jar for the Froggits—earning a few croaks of confusion for their trouble—then hurried back to their room for their notebook. For days, they'd watched and waited for an opportunity like this; they sensed that Cabbage would find some reason to veto their plan if they told them about wanting to help Alphys, even if they had no true intentions of telling anyone about the queen's friends, which was what Cabbage had _actually_ said not to do.

With pen and paper back in their possession, Lace headed for the window, but the latch was glued shut with a sticky gray slime. They stuck their tongue out and scraped their hand clean on the wall.

"NRioWtbbithayodRouibytobit…othoi..i.. 'eRtEreRidaobirbenit?gy,okugidoi?ng?" gurbled the three voices that belonged to Reaper Bird. Lace tried to untangle the words in their head, but made out the word _what_ plus a bunch of ribbiting and little else. Reaper Bird hovered behind them, bubbling and twisting their neck all around.

"WheRirWhbbait…etaarreeyyRoibbuoudit..?oignoging?" Reaper Bird demanded.

Lace flapped their hand and shook their head and raised a finger to their lips, _shh_. Instead of _shh_-ing Reaper Bird jerked their wings and beeped. Lace wrapped their arms around their sibling's neck and kept shushing and hugging them; since their arms were occupied they couldn't write, but that was fine since Reaper Bird had a hard time understanding what they wrote anyway.

Poor Reaper Bird. Lace understood why they'd be upset, with one sibling comatose and then two of them missing for so long, but Lace _had_ to go out by themselves. Even if it made them a little anxious, it was part of the plan; the first rule of keeping any kind of secret was to make sure as few people knew about it as possible, and Reaper Bird was a lot of people now.

"YoUgu'hreLeoMetngoowtofhMemebe,riwenikow… 'mdnoof..? ."

"Shh. _Shhhh!_"

Lace planted a quick kiss on top of Reaper Bird's beak, then let go before the personalities that didn't belong to their sibling got upset. They went back to the window and found it open, the slimy stuff dripping down over the glass.

Reaper Bird made a low noise, then sank into the shadows under the window. Lace waved goodbye, just in case their sibling was still watching. Then they clambered out and flew westward.

* * *

"sorry, but my neighbor... she's dead... she has been since last summer... when that human wanted to kill everyone..."

"..."

"so... if you wanted to talk to her... ..."

"..."

"... ... ..."

"..."

"this is... awkward... i hope it wasn't important..."

"..."

"that makes it sound like i don't think whatever you wanted to do was important, doesn't it..."

"..."

"sorry... i didn't mean to hurt your feelings... it must be important to you, if you came all this way from the city..."

"..."

"ohhh... you were just still writing..."

Lace held up their notebook. _but she DOES live nearby?_

The ghost's eyes were all wobbly and watery like they were about to burst into tears, but they were already like that when Lace arrived, and Lace didn't think the ghost had any reason to be _that_ sad about feeding a herd of snails. They were cute snails.

Lace leaned between the fence posts to pat one on the shell while the ghost leaned to the side with them to see their message.

"she used to... you can't miss it... just follow the left path, from the pond. It's shaped like a fish."

Lace's arms were too short to reach the snail. They pulled back and flipped through their notebook for a page where they'd already written the one word they needed: _thanks!_

"i know you're just saying that... i'm sorry i couldn't help, but she's dead, so... thanks for saying thanks, i guess..."

Hmmmm. For a ghost living in a kingdom—queendom?—ruled by a monster who could magically revive the dying, they were _awfully_ convinced that their neighbor was gone forever. Nonetheless, Lace nodded in thanks. Once Undyne turned up, _she_ could be the one to tell the ghost they were mistaken.

Lace left the snail farm. Passing by the pond on the way to the house next door, they had the funny sensation of being watched, though they were sure they were alone. Actually, they'd had that odd feeling ever since they left home, but it was particularly strong near the pond. Odd.

They peeked in through the windows. True to the ghost's word, the interior was dark, and when Lace tapped their knuckles on the door, nobody answered. They flew back, examining the exterior of the house. Cluttered next to the doorstep was a messy pile of long-dead flowers, faded blue and brown-yellow, their petals crushed; under them were a few stubby, burnt candles. And a folded note, written on nicer paper than the kind Lace owned, pinned shut with a tiny plastic sword. Minus the little sword, the whole collection looked like the sort of things left over at the funerals which were so common early in the past summer, but they'd been arranged into something like a little shrine. And then just sort of... pushed aside. There were crushed bits of flower petals on the front step, like that was where everything had been originally been arranged, before somebody came along and decided they needed to get into the house. Somebody, but not Undyne. Unless that ghost was even more wrong than Lace thought.

They picked up the note and pulled one corner up to look inside; the handwriting was _awful_, like it belonged to a little kid. Lace bit their lip and put the note back where they'd found it.

Backtracking toward the pond, they stopped to sniff the air. Sweet and lemony, like the fake candy flavor of cough syrup. In a wave, it brought back all the conflicting feelings of hiding in the secret lab, and being told _yes this is Rosy, but they're other people now, too, and they'll get upset if you use their old names_, and clinging to Cabbage's dress while their sibling argued with their friends, _begging_ them not to go to the Core, and sitting together in the restless muted buzz of monsters pacing or hugging dust jars in stupefied silence or trying to comfort the huddled flocks of crying kids—one of Undyne's last orders was for her guards to prioritize getting children to safety above looking for missing monsters, even if those monsters were their parents, and there were little kids _everywhere_—and not knowing if it was okay to feel happy about having Reaper Bird-neé-Rosy back, or if it was bad, or if it even _mattered_ since there was no guarantee that the human wouldn't just backtrack to Hotland once they were done killing Cabbage's friends and all the other strong monsters trying to stop them, and then...

...that last part... those fears didn't come to pass. And the human went away, and they wouldn't... they most _likely_ wouldn't...

...Anyway, that lemon scent, there was a monster who smelled like that. The fish girl who Alphys bought back to life, along with Reaper Bird and the rest. Lace didn't know her, then or now, but they'd liked being near her when they were in the lab. She smelled nicer than the dust.

Lace gnawed their sleeve as they alighted at the edge of the pond, trying to focus on _here_. The sparkle of their wings quivered over the dark water; their shadow seemed to fidget like a separate being from themselves. "um..?" they breathed, the sound more a hum in their thin chest than a spoken word. But nothing happened.

After they'd extended a hand to dip into the water, but before they made contact, Lace felt a tap on their shoulder, and jumped—they hadn't heard anyone come near, and the ghost couldn't have touched them. But there at their side stood a stubby, pale monster, looking down at them with two hollow eye holes set in a skull-like beaked face. Lace silently gasped and skittered back like the startled bug that they were, but the beaked monster didn't chase them. Or say anything. Or move.

Once Lace was a short distance from the pond, the beaked monster motion for them to stay where they were, then calmly popped its own head off and drop-kicked it into the water. Butterflies oozed from the stump of its neck; the head blinked serenely before sinking and vanishing, along with the monster's body. And the butterflies. A few drops of water splashed onto Lace's dress.

Lace stared.

Before the ripples in the water had subsided, a different face, one which lacked any features beyond numerous pointed teeth, popped up from the water, hissing softly in irritation. Actually _recognizing_ this one, Lace raised their hand in a hesitant little wave.

"...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..."

"...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..." "...It's only you..."

"...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?"

"...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" "...You came to visit me..?" the Amalgamate sighed. Her voices rumbled up from the floor, from the water, from inside Lace's head. At such close proximity, they could taste the lemon scent. It made their tongue tingle. Maybe it was getting into their head and making them see things that didn't exist. Headless monsters and butterflies.

"Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?"

"Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?" "Do you think I'm pretty?"

Lace slowly inched closer to the pond again. Lemons... that was her name. No. Lemon Bread. They carefully wrote out a message and held up their notebook for her to see: _hello miss lemon bread! my name is lace and im looking for undyne have you seen her recently? or someone else that went in her house to look for her? also everyone is pretty in their own way :)_

The frilly fin on the Amalgamate's tail waved lazily just below the surface. She considered their question.

"Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left."

"Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left." "Recently... Gerson passed by here... he took her clothing... and left."

Gerson? The name brought to mind one of Cabbage's random dissertations on pre-war monster history, but it wasn't like Lace ever _listened_. They tilted their head.

"...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..."

"...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." "...The old turtle..." Lemon Bread tried to clarify.

Okay. An old turtle with a really old-sounding name. That narrowed things down, a little, sort of. Lace wrote a new question: _where did he go?_

"That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..."

"That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..." "That shop... or his home... I don't know..."

"Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?"

"Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?" "Won't you stay here with me instead?"

Lace shrugged noncommittally; not wanting to be mean to the fish girl, they wrote: _sorry, i'm looking for undyne. but i can come back later if you're lonely?_

Lemon Bread read their response and... smiled? She did _something_ with her face that involved several rows of teeth. Lace wasn't actually sure how an eyeless monster could read written messages, but she seemed to be doing just fine, and they were already trying not to think too much about their hallucination of a headless monster, so they decided not to worry about Lemon Bread either.

"That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..."

"That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." "That's what they all say..." She murmured, and slipped underwater.

* * *

Lace wandered through Waterfall for the better part of an hour. They didn't know if it had always been so sparsely populated, or if an especially large number of monsters died there, or if everyone just decided to move away, but they saw almost no one.

They found a piano and played with it, pressing keys down with their hands until they heard a dog barking somewhere... behind the wall? They didn't know what to make of that, but it startled them into remembering what they were supposed to be doing. They flew away.

Eventually they found the shop. _A_ shop, anyway—with a wood sign hanging down and informing them that it was "CLOSED". They sighed, letting their antennae droop, and flew on.

They traveled for what seemed like a long, long time, along a straight path in a straight tunnel, empty and unmarked except for the blue gemstones in the wall. And a big gray door. Lace stopped to examine it, decided it probably didn't lead to where they were trying to go, and flew back the way they came. Luckily, a little onion-shaped monster happened to be passing by at that particular moment, allowing Lace to chase them down and ask for directions to Gerson's home. They'd been going in the right direction after all, funny enough, so they ended up turning right around and going back down the path they'd already started venturing down. The tunnel seemed shorter the second time Lace passed through it, and they didn't notice that door again. But, then, they weren't looking for it.

* * *

"Eh? You here to sell cookies or somethin'?" asked the old turtle, in that kind of tone where Lace wasn't sure if he was serious or not, or mad or not.

They smiled nervously and kept holding the note out until he finally took it.

Gerson squinted at the small, cramped print, and to their dismay, did exactly what they hated more than anything, which was reading their note out loud. Slowly. And emphasizing all the wrong words. "'I'm looking for _Undyne_ and heard that you might... know where she is and... _may_ know where she is and/or what she is doing. _If_ you know, and do not mind, please help me find her.'"

Lace squirmed, hiding their face behind their notebook until he finished.

"...You're lookin for Undyne, kid?"

They nodded from behind their notebook.

"Hate to be the bearer of bad news, if you can call it 'news'... but she died. Months ago. Woulda thought that was common knowledge by now."

Lace pointed earnestly to the last sentence they'd written, crinkling the paper. Gerson scratched his chin.

"And that... doesn't seem like a problem to ya?"

And didn't the existence of Alphys and Determination seem like a _solution_? Blegh. Everyone in Waterfall was a pessimist.

Lace sighed, and in extra-big print, wrote: _why did you go in undynes house?_

"'Why _did_ you go in Un_dyne's_ house'," he read out, even more laboriously than before. Was he doing this on purpose? He was old. But also seemed like the sort of person who'd do it on purpose. "...Now who told you _that_?"

_went there. L.B. said you took things. that sounds like stealing but thats bad and i dont think youre bad so were you getting them __for__ someone else? (undyne?)_

They shook out their wrist to keep their hand from cramping, then added: _i don't want to do anything bad either, i promise! i just want to talk to her and ask something only she'd know._

Gerson narrowed his one good eye at them. Lace nervously chewed their sleeve, but tried to stare back.

After a long minute—long enough for their old self to run away crying, if they'd even had the courage to knock on the door in the first place, and long enough to make the new Lace sweat—Gerson shook his head and chuckled. "...Wah hah! You're a real sleuth, aren'tcha, kid?" He scratched his scalp beneath his hat, then stepped back into the house, pushing the door further open after him. "As it happens, there is somebody under this roof who could use a little company from somebody that ain't an old coot like me. If you're that set on paying a visit, I s'pose there's no harm in letting you come in and see her."

Lace nodded eagerly, their SOUL thrumming with determination and relief in equal measure. He led them inside; the lights in the front room were on, and the kitchen at the other side was a bright island; between them, the house was dim. Lace didn't mind, being a moth, though it seemed a little dangerous for an elderly monster without dark vision to leave his house like that. Not that they were any authority on how to survive into old age, considering what had almost happened to them...

Just outside what looked to be the living room, Gerson stopped. "Say... it slipped my mind 'til now... but you wouldn't happen to be from Snowdin, now wouldja?"

Lace tried to imagine what that had to do with anything, failed, and shook their head.

"Ah. Guess that's for the best," he said, and didn't elaborate further. "Anyhoo, she's in there. I dunno if you two ever knew each other, but I should warn you that she's... well... _different_ now. You'll see what I mean. Not real fond of light or loud noises, either, so as much of a chatterbox as you are... I'd suggest ya keep it down to a dull roar. Wah hah hah!"

"..."

Lace went in.

When Cabbage first mentioned Undyne, they'd made it sound like she was completely unrecognizable. She always wore her knight armor—_plate_ armor, Cabbage would have said, like that made a difference—when she passed through New Home to see the king, so Lace couldn't judge whether their sibling was right or wrong or just making excuses, but they instantly understood what Gerson meant about her being _different_. The monster on the couch was curled up under a quilt like she was sleeping, but they could see that she wasn't. She just stared at the wall, silent and not exactly _there_. Like a monster who'd Fallen Down, almost.

Lace looked back to Gerson for reassurance, pulling up the collar of their dress and nibbling the fabric. He waved. _Go on_.

They perched on the arm of the couch and folded down their raggedy wings, their Determination not quite enough to keep the anxiety at bay. They'd been so concerned with looking for Undyne that they'd given little thought what they'd do once they'd found her. It didn't seem important at the time.

Pulling their collar higher over their face, Lace took a deep breath and whispered, "...um..?"

The windows didn't explode in a shower of broken glass, and the monster under the quilt didn't leap up and shake Lace and scream _HOW DARE YOU_. But she did turn her head to look at them, which made their throat tighten as surely as if her hands had closed around it.

"Wh..." She pushed herself up on her elbows, slow and groggy like she actually had been sleeping, and glanced over the back of the couch toward the kitchen, and Gerson. "...Where'd—" she coughed into her arm. The quilt, falling away from her shoulders, revealed a bulky, engulfing sweater with long sleeves, stained gray around the cuffs. "...Who're... you?"

Lace held up their notebook. Across the top of the page, in their very neatest print, they'd written: _Hello! My name is Lace. It's nice to meet you!_

Undyne's whole face was in shadow, save for one glowing pupil, narrow and feline. "...You... again."

Again? What did she... oh, that was right. Lace shook their head and fluttered their hands and tried to gesture, but without any good way to convey the concept of "siblings"—oh, how they wished they'd learned to sign—they went back to writing.

_you mean my sibling cabbage. its OK, we look alike!_

Undyne pushed her hair behind a stubby ear fin, and Lace caught a glimpse of an empty eye socket on her left side before her hair slipped right back down to where it had been. Having hair in one's face all the time seemed like it would be incredibly annoying, but Lace didn't have a ribbon like Cabbage's that they could offer. Judging by her guarded body posture, Lace wasn't sure Undyne would accept one, anyway.

"...What... 're you doing... here."

Though maybe less than thrilled about having a moth barging into her space—even if Gerson _did_ give them permission—she waited for Lace to finish writing their answer and offer their notebook, which she held with her sleeves scrunched into mittens around her hands so she wouldn't get the paper sticky.

While she read, Lace scooted closer so the sparkly sheen from their wings could provide some light. It was a little unnerving, if they thought too much about just _who_ they were with right now; some of their classmates would practically kill to meet Undyne. So they'd tried not to think about that part, and simply explained the situation as best they'd understood it: their sibling knew she was alive, and Alphys knew she was alive, but neither knew where Undyne had gone, which made the queen—with her gentle voice and yellow scales and long eyelashes—terribly sad. So what was a moth to do, but try and help find her missing friend?

(Okay, that wasn't _exactly _what they'd written. But Alphys had _very_ pretty eyelashes.)

Undyne stared at the page for what felt like ages. "Al...phys... sent you... to... f...find... me," she slowly rasped.

Lace vigorously shook their head, pointing to themselves.

"It was... your... idea."

They nodded.

"...Why."

Lace frowned. They pointed to the paragraph they'd just written.

"No. I... meant... ...you know I'm..." she stopped to catch her breath. The ends of her hair dribbled goo; Lace pulled their notebook out of the way and hugged it. "...Dead... I'm... dead. Should... be... dead. Isn't... that..?"

_lots of people "should" be dead. like me! but alphys healed me and saved us + you did too. thats what they said, you fought the human so we could run away._

"Not... what I... meant." A spasm of pain flashed across what little of her face they could see, and she looked away from their notebook, to the window.

Lace poked her through the sweater to make her look at their response: _do you mean b/c you look different? thats OK too. its not gross or scary._ They meant what they wrote. She wasn't gross. Just sort of... sad and sickly-looking. And slimy—her clothes and the seat under her and the quilt bunched up on her lap were stained gray, and the dripping ends of her hair and ear fins gave a pretty strong hint at how that happened. But Reaper Bird was all gooey, too, so that was no big deal.

Undyne made a funny scratchy noise in her throat. Another cough? Or maybe a laugh? "Uh... th...anks..?"

Lace brightened.

"...Wa...it..." she said suspiciously. "What do you... mean, she... healed... you?"

_i fell down so she used determination to cure it._

Undyne stared down at the page while they wrote. "De...termin...ation... ...that's... that's the... the..."

Lace nodded, holding up their arm and pretending to poke a needle into it, their thumb pressing an imaginary plunger. Until that moment, Undyne had slowly begun to relax. Now she looked at them the way those Froggits always did now, except she was a lot more intimidating than any of _them_.

"She... used... it."

Lace nodded again. They weren't sure why this seemed to disturb Undyne so much, so they started to explain.

_other monsters fell down too. we were in the hospital, she gave the determination to the doctors and told them how m_

"SHE _USED_ IT?!"

Undyne yanked the notebook from Lace's hands, holding it close to her face like the words might magically change. Lace clawed at the notebook, trying to grab it back, but a sick, weakened Undyne was still many times stronger than a Determined Lace; all they managed to do was rip the top page out, which pushed them over the edge from upset to panicked. _GIVE IT BACK_, they wanted to demand, _GIVE IT BACK GIVE IT BACK GIVE IT BACK_, but they couldn't and they needed their notebook to do that but they hadn't given it to her, she'd _taken_ it, and now they couldn't say anything and what if it got too dirty for them to write or she refused to give it back? Just like the bigger kids at school—how they used to grab Lace's notebook and laugh because there was nothing they could do except—except what?

Speaking was impossible. Writing was impossible. They couldn't just flee the house because she still had their notebook, and they couldn't ask Gerson for help because _she still had their notebook_. So Lace did the first and only thing they could think to do.

They bit Undyne.

Except, no, they only _tried_ to bite her. They grabbed her sleeve and buried their teeth into her wrist, but

**[̦͔̤** **̊̋ͭ͆͂ͥ҉̜͙͖̪̳C̺̝ͥA̱̮̼ͧͪ̐N̨̦͓̤̟̬̙̟͌̓̌͐̒'̻̻̟̻̤͖́͊ͧT̪͎͍̒ͤ̓̔̽͂** **͇ͭͬͤ̿ͥ͗]̰̪̗̚**

that wasn't what happened. What _really_ happened was that the room went all dark and fractured and their jaw snapped shut on empty air with a painful _clack_.

"The—_hell?!_" Undyne jerked her arm back and shoved Lace away, sending them flying. And not the good kind of flying that involved wings.

As Lace cartwheeled across the room, they had just enough time to think something like, _if this doesn't kill me then Cabbage will_ before the wall rushed forward to meet them. And then there was no time left to think, so instead of thinking they twisted themselves around to get their hands and feet between themselves and the wall and pushed off just as they made contact, leaving a crack in the plaster and a few small scrapes and bruises on Lace, but sparing their head from taking the hit instead. Lace tumbled down, dizzy and disoriented but maybe the tiniest bit proud.

And landed softly into the arms of a short, stubby, headless monster.

"Wh—the _HELL?_" Undyne snarled again, louder, giving voice to what Lace wouldn't have said themselves even if they could, but _felt_. A small swarm of butterflies writhed around the headless monster's neck and tickled Lace's nose.

Lace rolled out of the headless monster's arms and landed on the floor, swallowing a pained whimper when their knees hit the hard floor; the headless monster disintegrated, turned into more butterflies, and disappeared. Undyne was already on her feet, wobbling just the littlest bit as she faced... Reaper Bird?

"_Drdoino'tnbp'tbitockuconbthhiemtehetm!_" Lace's big sibling buzzed, angrier than they had ever seen them since they came back.

"What—_is—that_—?!" Undyne choked out, and Lace could've answered but they _couldn't_ because she'd dropped their notebook somewhere. And they didn't have any time to look for it, because then Reaper Bird lunged at Undyne. With a crackle of electric-blue magic, she summoned a jagged, misshapen spear and she slashed at their sibling's neck, and Lace tried to rush forward to stop her but it was too late and

**[̟̎̾̾ͧ͋͞ ̴̜̯͙̦̹̩̱F̟̯ͧͮͬͭͭA̹̪͞I͂̿̄̾̓͏͉ͅL̺͎͔̬̽̔ͥ̄̉̃͜U̻̹̼͈̍ͭͭͬͅŘ̺̬̐Ĕ̱̬͔͕ ͍̗̭̼́͐ͣ̽̅̚͠ͅ]̤͊ͭ̃̓ͨ̄ ̷̣ͫ̆ ̠͇̻̹͔̘̟͊̈̄ ̜̯͔͇͇̄͌̑̍̍͘ ͉̲̒̿̀[̶̦̬̭̣̖̋͊̅ͧ̓ͫͯͅN̸͚̟Ö̮̫́ͤT̛͈̖͙̀ͫ̎Hͯ̽̈́̌̾͒͏̗I̩ͯ̏N͓G̱̲͔̼̻̭̱̉ ͗̚͏̗̰̻̤̦H̵͈͕̹̱͕̹̀̐A̵̺̪̳̹̒͗ͣ̓ͣͩͮP̘̺͈͉͈̀͗͊̍ͥ͘P̧̝̞̫̞̩̪̥͐̅̍̃E͕͍͙͇̥̠Ṇ͒ͯ̅͐͐̈Ẹ̬̓ͭ͆͂D̖̦ͬ͑͊̃̓ͩ̚]͖͎͊ͣ̊̋ͮ̈́̋ ̨̹̈̒ ͩ̀͐̓̐͒ ̒ ̝̘ͧͦͣ̔̎͜ ̱͉̱̗͊̍̂͒̅̈́̊ͅ ̣̝̲̩̰̀̾͐͐ͧ[ͨͮ̄̑ͣ͏̖̙̮̝͉̰D̜̬̳̻͚ͨ̏I̟̲͙͕̙̮D̺͖͙͇̎̓͞N̰̲̘̱͈͇̊͑̽͆'͎̟ͯ̑̓͐̑ͣT҉̥͇̫̫͕ ̰ͮ́ͩͥͩ͊͘W̜̬Õ̩̝̓ͧR̓̐K̤̭̦̹̓͆ͫͦͪ͊̕]̊̌͗͏̖͇͎̖**

it didn't matter anyway; her weapon harmlessly dissipated and Reaper Bird was floating right where they'd started out, as if they hadn't moved at all. They burbled in frustration and Undyne snarled back. Lace didn't really know what was going on and it made them want to cry; they didn't even know where their sibling had come from but now they were _fighting_ with Undyne and oh this was bad, bad, _bad_, Cabbage really was going to kill them—!

"That's enough, you _both!_"

The air hummed with more magic. The room turned green, and every sound except their own panicked breathing turned muffled. Lace rubbed their eyes and and tried to get up, but bumped their head on... green glass? No, something else. A little dome surrounded them, small enough for them to touch the roof with their fingertips, translucent and patterned with geometric shapes that evoked the shell of a turtle. Reaper Bird was trapped inside a second dome, making jittery little motions and squawking what sounded like mangled swear words.

Undyne, stuck under a third, glowing barrier, pounded against the inside without a spear or any magic, just with her hands. Cracks formed along its surface, but healed themselves with a wave from the old turtle. With his other hand, he held a glowing hammer, leaving the head resting on the floor and leaning on the handle like a walking stick.

_"Undyne._ That's _enough_. While you're in my home, you won't..."

He stopped. Undyne stopped, too, wobbling back and either sitting or falling down on her butt, curling her arms over her head and pulling her knees into her chest. The room went dark again, despite being filled with green magic, and then she wasn't there.

Another gesture from Gerson, and the magic dissipated, including the hammer. Reaper Bird twitched and jerked, then slid over to Lace and nudged them. Lace shakily reached up to pat their beak, a little dazed, before their big sibling left their side and went off toward the couch. The scrapes on their palms were gone.

"You and your friend all right, kiddo?" Gerson scratched his head. "Guess I shoulda warned you, but... now I coulda sworn that I never saw them 'til now. My memory ain't THAT bad now, is it..?"

Lace pointed to where Undyne had been.

"Eh? Undyne? Yeah, that's a new trick of hers," he remarked. "...Though, I can't say she's done anything like THAT before."

They nodded, dropping their hand to their lap. Nothing Gerson said really registered in their mind, so they didn't know why they were nodding, except habit. It wasn't like he'd asked a question, and if he wanted to imply one, then Lace didn't know the answer. They didn't even know exactly what they'd done wrong. They thought they'd been doing the right thing. Except they weren't. And now Undyne was... they didn't even know where she could possibly be _now_, and Gerson sure wasn't going to tell them, even if they were brave or dumb enough to follow... they really had ruined everything. And they'd even forgotten to ask about her friend Sans while they'd had the chance...

Reaper Bird made a gentle burbling sound and slid Lace's notebook across the floor from where it had fallen. The cover was gone, and the pages were all crumpled, flecked with gray.

And that, somehow, was what made Lace finally burst into tears.

* * *

At a safe distance from Gerson's house, Lace lightly poked at Reaper Bird and scrunched up their face. The question they wanted to convey was _you've been following me this whole time?, _but they didn't know how to express any of the elements of that question—especially that creepy headless magic attack _thing—_and didn't feel like going back to the house for their lost pen. Or facing Gerson again. Ever.

"SoRrShrye's,iaLbuabbit... ," said Reaper Bird.

Lace made out the sound of their own name and the word "_she's_" and not much else. They sighed. They were tired, and they couldn't say anything now, whether that was thanking their big sibling for trying to look after them, or asking just how badly they thought Lace had ruined things, or what Cabbage would think. So instead, they slid their arms around Reaper Bird's long, long neck, and buried their face in the damp scaly feather-things under their wing.

It wasn't quite the same as writing, but it got the message across.


	6. eh bien, continuons

The river was shallow but fast-moving, dotted by the slick edges of rocks above the waterline. Undyne jumped and landed wrong, the impact shooting up through her ankle and pitching her to one side. She threw herself to the next rock anyway, then the next, never stopping to regain her balance, daring her wobbly legs to fail her.

Which they did. Her clothes got soaked. They were already dripping with slime, so she didn't notice. She got up.

With the current swirling around her knees, Undyne lurched to the opposite shore and circled the cliff's edge, feeling her way into the cave behind the waterfall. Her muddy sweater squelched as she pressed her back to the wall and slid down. No conscious thought had led her there; all she knew was that she needed to get away from that house, _now_. Could've gone home instead? No, too far. Just had to get away. Had to...

...run away. From a little kid. A Whimsun and their pet bird-frog-thing. A _Whimsun_.

Undyne groaned, slamming her head back into the wall. Starbursts fizzled behind her eye and the world went foggy. "Fuck." she mumbled thickly. Damp tendrils of hair clung to her cheeks, glued in place with slime and condensation, tugging her fragile not-quite-scales with each word. Goo dribbled down to her jaw. "_Fuck._"

Sans made the mental version of a wince; he still didn't know how to cope with physical pain. At least he couldn't die. This time.

_undyne, you gotta—chill, ok? just, uh, just take a minute to—_

_Shut_ _up_, she thought back.

_this isn't helping_.

_YOU'RE not helping._

_...forget this. i don't owe her anything_, Sans thought to himself, which meant nothing since she still heard. When he reflected that this whole situation was actually kind of funny—_for a monster that used to teach, she's not great with kids, huh?_—Undyne heard that, too.

She slumped over, webbed fingers tangling in her sticky hair, her knees pressing to her forehead. She considered flinging herself down the waterfall and taking Sans with her. Instead, she buried her fangs into her own hand, just as that moth kid had tried to do. Sans' thought process short-circuited, turned into a mental scream, and he fled to a some dark little corner of her mind. Her hand bled gray slime.

Stiffly, Undyne sat up. This wasn't such a bad spot to choose, actually; she used to come to this spot on her breaks, or when she was feeling stressed, and she'd meditate. Nobody else seemed to even know this spot existed.

Undyne closed her eye and leaned back into the wall, forcing her back to straighten. Loosely crossing her legs into a clumsy lotus pose, she visualized herself as a rock planted firmly in a riverbed. Her thoughts floated past, bobbing and bumping together, and drifted into the distance.

(_Ten years from "now", Yuuya studied for a math test with their human classmates, and Undyne thought about the surrealism of it all; if any one of these kids had been born earlier and fallen into the Underground, they would have become a figure of legend, a vessel for every monster's hopes and dreams, whose seventh SOUL would have granted Asgore the power to save monsterkind by destroying humanity, and their memory would have lived on forever in monster history—but here they were all nobodies, and the power of a human SOUL meant nothing; with twelve billion other humans running around on the surface, no one in Ebott had noticed or cared when Frisk disappeared into the mountain... ...and in a different time, Sans dodged magic attacks from a yellow flower that snarled curse words at him with a squeaky cereal-mascot voice, which was hilarious aside from the part where, two time-loops later, it went back and am_bush_ed him in his room before he even knew it existed... ...and Frisk gasped in agony as an energy spear punched through their gut, and then they were fourteen years old and asking Undyne not to tell Toriel that they'd been slipping out to visit Asgore, knowing how their mom still mistrusted him... ...and two little skeletons were following a willowy monster through a sunlit laboratory... ...and Alphys was having a total anxiety attack over passing her "bad genes" onto the baby after Undyne wondered out loud if they might need glasses, except there wasn't a baby and there was never going to be one, because Undyne had just shattered her spine tackling the human off the bridge, except _that_ didn't matter either because the human died and time RELOADed... ...and Papyrus was telling Sans all about his "cool hangout" with the human and how impressed they were with his action figures and racecar bed; later, when Sans met with the kid in a deserted, fancy restaurant, he asked them why they were so determined to get back to the surface, and they munched lukewarm fries and ripped the takeout bag into greasy confetti and pretended not to hear; looking back on that conversation as an adult, they confirmed his suspicion that they hadn't known why, either... ...and then they'd collapsed on the bridge in Waterfall, twenty years earlier, bleeding to death, while a nameless monster stared up at the ceiling lights through the grating over its tank...)_

The palms of her hands were extra slimy. Undyne cracked her eye open and the world wobbled back into existence, all soft and unfocused. Hovering in the air in front of her, in golden letters as bright and sharp as knives, was a word, and beside it, an almost-word:

**[̸ ̢ŖELOAD̵ ]̡ ̧͠[̴̴͢ ̢̛͘͟͠R̷̶**_**E̶͜S҉**_**E̛͏͜҉T̴̸̛͢ ̛****]̨͢**

Her fingers drifted up to graze the letters. If she wanted, she could go back to before that kid showed up at Gerson's house to humiliate her. She could start this whole day over, and nobody would ever know.

With a sigh, she dropped her hand. If Sans' memories were to be believed, too many RELOADs in a row did funny things to people's heads, left behind the distorted afterimages of what had been erased—and anyway, what she really wanted was to erase it from her own memory, which was exactly how her new superpower _didn't_ work. Along with not letting her go back far enough to stop Frisk from abusing _their_ power, or save anyone's lives, or save _herself_ from Alphys' idea of "helping". According to Sans, doing that stuff would've just set off some kind of paradox, but she didn't care. She could've figured it out, somehow.

The letters faded.

Undyne slouched into the wall and rubbed her hand, finding that the punctures had healed while she was distracted. She still felt a twinge of remorse. "S...ans..? Hey?"

Mist drifted up from the falling water at the cave entrance. Undyne looked out at it for a while. _Look on the bright side, _she eventually thought, scratching absently under the empty socket where her left eye had been. She'd lost it so long ago that she barely remembered what binocular vision felt like. _Now that you're dead, you NEVER have to pay off your tab at Grillby's._

If Sans were listening but just sulking, that should have at least gotten a snicker out of him. Maybe he'd gone to sleep.

"...Screw you... too... then," Undyne said aloud, without much feeling.

She sighed again. Kept staring out at the water. She should really head back to the house, she knew, but she wasn't looking forward to whatever Gerson would have to say about her throwing a kid into a wall. And she wasn't looking forward to what the kid might do or say, either; in a few days, a whole swarm might show up at the front porch to ogle, or get the new royal guard to arrest her, or something. She could always RELOAD to avoid any unwanted visitors, if she cared enough to bother, but that wasn't going to be a permanent solution. If one random Whimsun could track her down, then anyone could... though, with all the cameras installed throughout Waterfall, the _real_ surprise was that Alphys hadn't found her already.

...Alphys. _Alphys_.

In all the time Undyne had wasted, lying around like a pathetic blob and hating herself, Alphys had been injecting monsters with Determination. What was happening to them all? That Whimsun had talked (well, written) about it like it was the most normal thing in the world, but maybe they'd just gotten lucky. If they were fragile enough to Fall Down at such an early age, maybe their family was afraid to burden them with survivor's guilt by telling them what happened to everyone else Alphys had used as a test subject. Maybe something miserable was _going_ to happen, and it just hadn't yet. In the old world, Alphys only told everyone about the monsters in the true lab after the barrier broke, so it was possible that nobody knew the truth about those experiments this time around. Sans knew all along, didn't he?

But that didn't make sense. Alphys herself knew what had happened to those monsters, and she knew _damn well_ what she'd turned Undyne into, and what had happened to Sans as a result. So what did she think she was doing? What was _wrong_ with her?

Undyne hugged herself, but it didn't help much. Her soggy clothes clung flat to her thin, filmy skin, sapping away all her body heat.

At first, she'd thought that she just didn't know how to feel about Alphys anymore. In the old world, they'd been together long enough to settle down and have a kid and watch them reach adulthood, and this time, Alphys had locked her in a fish tank as a science experiment, and if there existed a more legitimate reason to have mixed feelings about a person, then that was news to her. But her memories of other people were warped and tainted, too—Papyrus, Asgore, Yuuya, even the humans on the surface who she'd slowly learned to befriend. She was angry about what happened to them, sure, but only because they were _hers_, and Frisk took them away for no reason; she didn't really _miss_ anyone, no matter how she poked and prodded at her memories of them, like a bad tooth, trying to make them hurt worse. Maybe, if she could still feel all these emotions, then she'd know exactly how to feel about Alphys. But she couldn't. And she didn't. So she mostly avoided thinking about her at all.

"...Dammit," Undyne mumbled, to nobody except herself.

Because she knew it didn't matter how she felt, or didn't feel. She'd been the captain of the royal guard, once, and it was her job to protect monsterkind—a task she'd failed to accomplish when she died. And then she failed everyone again by wasting her time buried under a blanket or lurking in the back of Gerson's shop, dreaming of revenge against an enemy she couldn't reach. And she was failing right now, sitting here in this little cave, doing nothing to help anyone.

"...Stupid... freaking... Whimsun," she added.

But she still got up, wet and shivering and uncomfortable, and after a long pause, she dragged herself back out through the waterfall. That kid was going to get what they'd wanted from her, after all.

...Or... not.

* * *

Sunlight streamed through the barrier, through the stained glass, down to the mirror-polished floor of the golden hall. Undyne's shadow stretched out behind her. Her bare feet left two slimy gray puddles on the marble.

(_"And, considering what you've done..." Sans intoned, "...what will you do now?"_

_The human stared daggers, hating him with a desperate, personal intensity. Sans looked out at the trail of small, dusty footprints they'd tracked through the hall, and ran his phalanges over the folded edge of the photo in his pocket_.)

Undyne squinted, turning her head down so her hair would shield her eye from the light. She hadn't bothered going back to the house for a change of clothes, and the tiny part of her that still possessed a scrap of dignity was recoiling in disgust. She must've looked like something that crawled out of a sewer.

The back of her neck tingled as if she were being watched.

_what's the plan, boss?_

Completely ignoring Sans wasn't a great option, so she settled for choosing not to acknowledge him, pouring all her concentration into the act of moving one foot in front of the other, as if she were trying to cross a frozen river. Whatever she looked like, she wasn't going to let Alphys see her wobbling around like a pitiful baby deer.

(_"Whoa! L-look!" Alphys whispered, pulling Undyne's hand. A deer—a real one, not just a deer monster—swiveled an ear in their direction, then bolted into the undergrowth._)

She made it to the top of the stairs just as her legs decided they'd had enough and buckled, forcing her to grab the railing for support before she could hit the floor. Undyne breathed deep and watched the golden letters—_RELOAD_—shimmering at the edge of vision. She shook her head and refocused on her surroundings. It felt a little unreal, returning to the castle; she almost expected Asgore to appear around the corner and sweep her up in a big, furry hug, or offer tea, the way he did the last time she was here, before Frisk came back.

...Asgore wasn't here anymore. Sans had been at the funeral, just like everyone else. He'd watched the king's dust being spread across the garden.

"Alphys?"

The railing creaked as she released her grip. Coughing into her sleeve to try and clear her throat, she called out louder. "...Al...phys? You... here?"

No dead boss monsters appeared. And no lizard monsters.

There was no sign of Alphys in the next room over, either, though there was plenty of evidence that she'd _been_ there. Clusters of empty soda cans stood arranged like bowling pins on the table, next to a pile of little clockwork-looking mechanisms and wires which had all been pushed to the center to make room for a case of screwdrivers and wrenches in all different sizes; a hacksaw, a soldering iron. Undyne poked her head into the kitchen, but found

(_Standing on a kitchen chair to reach over the edge of the counter,_ _Yuuya held a recipe card up to their snout, then selected three eggs from the carton and carefully arranged them in a neat row, pointing end-to-end._

_"What'cha making?" Undyne asked._

_"It's a quiche! Sans got it from her. Um, the recipe, I mean. And Toriel. From her."_

_Even the floor was dusted with flour, as if a miniature snowstorm had recently passed through. That stuff was seriously flammable, but Undyne didn't bother mentioning this fact. Fires were weirdly rare with Yuuya at the helm. "you want help?"_

_"Nope." They cracked the third egg into their bowl and gathered the broken shells into a little stack, leaning over to toss it into the trash. Their tail flicked. "I got thi—"_

_The eggshells flew over the rim of the trash can, splattering cracked shell bits and gooey traces of egg white over the floor._

_"...Gah! Y-you didn't see that!"_)

nothing, except a pile of dirty dishes in the sink. Something inside Undyne ached, but she forgot it as soon as she left to check the bedrooms.

The blankets on Asgore's bed was creased like somebody had slept on top of them—_woulda been a shame not to_, Sans said—but everything else was undisturbed, even the king's journal sitting open on the table. The kids' room looked more like the kitchen, with a soda can on the nightstand and a laptop plastered with candy-colored anime stickers sitting open on the bed. Sans' blue hoodie hung from a hook on the wall, while on the floor between the beds, a pair of feet in dainty kitten heels protruded from under a white tarp.

"What the..?"

Undyne pushed open the tarp with one foot, standing unsteadily. Underneath was a life-sized humanoid doll with a frilly pink dress and wires spilling out from the neck, its head cradled under one arm like a football with pink pigtails. (And cat ears, which most footballs had.) The doll's other hand grasped a beribboned scepter, though the pink cat face at the top had been swapped out for a hollow, heart-shaped glass bulb. Undyne blinked and dropped the corner of the tarp.

_that's a mew development._

Undyne imagined an audience in a theater, all booing. Up on the imaginary stage, Sans shrugged and winked. His left arm ended in a bloody stump at the elbow; his skull was cracked like a dropped eggshell.

"What... is she... _doing?_"

_i really, really wish i was in a position to tell you._

Undyne stepped carefully around the doll-robot-catgirl-thing to check the laptop; the screen was dark. There was a clipboard full of handwritten papers sitting next to the computer, some kind of chart, but just glancing at it filled her with

(_"B-but the Temmies are okay! Even the ones that stayed in the village all survived, w-which I wasn't expecting but, obviously it's good news. The human must not have realized they were even there._"

_"Mnnhhn." It _was_ good to hear, and not just because of the medicine in her system, which left her feeling all warm and floaty. That part was great too, though. "...Whr're...we?"_

_"Where are we? Um... it's, um..."_

_Alphys launched into a long, winding answer, adjusting the IV line and avoiding eye contact._ _Undyne flexed her fingers, watching dazedly as they melted and dripped onto the mattress._

_By the time her friend had finished speaking, it sank in that this was probably not something that should be happening._

_"...Uh. Alph...ys."_)

a bad feeling. She didn't touch it.

"Where... is she?"

_unless she's hiding under the bed, not here._

"Gee... thanks." Undyne coughed, her throat seizing up. "Where... would she... usually..." It was easier to keep their thoughts distinct when she spoke out loud, but forming the words took conscious effort, and it had been a while since she'd done it for this long. Gerson gave her funny looks when he noticed her mumbling to herself.

_Where would she normally be right now?_

_in the lab, with you. i guess._

Undyne said nothing to that.

Drawing on Sans' memories, she dug through his hoodie pockets for his phone, but it seemed that Alphys had found it first. Sans felt a flash of relief at knowing his password would be impossible to guess, which turned to fear once he remembered that this was _Alphys_... which turned to apathy once he remembered that he was dead and had no reason to care anymore. Which was great, because Undyne didn't care about whatever secrets he'd been keeping, either.

She limped out to the main room, equal parts restless and tired. Waiting for Alphys to come home was the simplest option, but sitting around doing nothing in the castle wasn't any more useful than sitting around on Gerson's couch. She could keep looking for Sans' phone in hopes that Alphys had left it somewhere, but she doubted she could turn it on and dial without smothering it in goo.

She folded her arms and tried, through the confused patchwork of memories floating through her mind, to remember the face of that moth kid, and their creepy bird... sibling? Right, their sibling. And their notebook. She thought, too, of the other monsters they'd mentioned, who Alphys had injected with Determination. And she thought, too, about a monster floating in a tank, deep in the true lab, hidden away from everyone.

Then she walked out of the castle and into New Home.


	7. Ys

As a little kid playing video games under the covers when she should've been asleep, Alphys sometimes encountered a certain type of glitch. Integer overflow. If a boss dealt damage beyond the highest number the programming could represent, their attack's power would wrap back around and heal your character instead; if a weak character "gained" negative experience points, they'd suddenly shoot up to the highest possible level.

All her fears had been realized. She'd finally told the truth, let the whole Underground know her last, worst secret, and she was alone, with no logical reason to still be alive. Asgore was dead, Mettaton was dead—and it was her fault. Undyne _had_ been dead, and then she was alive but _close_ to dying _again_, and now she'd disappeared, her condition a mystery. And Sans...

—But those were just the people personally important to Alphys. She could extend the list with all the monsters killed by the human she'd failed to stop, and all the monsters who Fell Down and slowly perished because she'd failed to give them any hope for the future. Their dust was on her hands, too. They were all important to other people, _all_ of them.

Hope. What did that feel like? She barely remembered.

* * *

Without having planned it, Alphys was already on a path to her own downfall. There wasn't enough Determination for everyone who Fell Down, so the doctors agreed to ration it all out to the youngest and smallest patients, leaving behind extended families of dragons or golems or sea-monsters with dead parents or siblings or kids or _whoever_ and every reason to want to crush Alphys like a grape.

Sans saved her from getting squashed flat in a falling elevator, she'd failed to save _him_, now she was going to get mauled by one of her own subjects. Beautiful. Karma in action.

In whatever time she had left before the revolution came to put her out of her misery, Alphys decided to try doing her job, just for the heck of it. It began with decisions that, if she'd put literally any thought into them, she would have recognized as being horrifically stupid—climbing down and up a dark elevator shaft to retrieve her notes and the Determination; handing the whole supply over to monsters who knew even less about it than she did; openly _telling_ people, live on TV, that she'd done so, and openly admitting that she'd lied about the Determination and used most of it on somebody else, a monster whose identity and location she was keeping secret _even after saying she didn't want to keep any more secrets_; telling them Sans was missing, and that she didn't know for sure what had happened to him, but making no effort to find the one monster who knew, and announcing his disappearance _after_ traipsing around New Home wearing his hoodie.

Just once, a monster came to the castle and shouted at her. A big oni with a sharp horn and a dead best friend.

_WHY HADN'T SHE HELPED THEM? WHY WERE THOSE OTHER MONSTERS IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO SAVE, BUT NOT THEM?_

As the oni loomed over her, shaking with grief and anger, Alphys envisioned herself saying something so vile and repugnant that he'd have no choice but to kill her and be done with it. But leaving him without answers would be cruel, so she did her best to give a real explanation. With only a limited supply of Determination and no guarantee that the injections would work, there was no way to save every monster that had Fallen Down; the best the doctors could do was maximize the total number of lives saved. The amount of Determination necessary to revive a monster without melting them was proportionate to the amount of physical matter they possessed, which meant that attempting to save the life of a physically large monster meant giving up the chance to save multiple smaller or younger monsters. One death versus two or three or five.

If Alphys ever got her hands on a new human SOUL, it would be theoretically possible to bring back monsters who'd already turned to dust. But she didn't exactly recommend that method.

Then she awkwardly patted his shoulder when he broke down crying, not knowing what else to do, and stopped when he shooed her off. More words were exchanged, and none of them were happy, but the oni went home without violence.

Later, she found herself thinking, for the first time in years, about those RPGs she used to play, the ones with cute mage girls and big swords. Of all things.

* * *

Even with a steady influx of caffeine into her system, Alphys sometimes slept.

She dreamed about water.

She dreamed she broke the barrier and saw that there was no surface world, and there never had been. A vast, dark ocean lapped at her feet, spilling past her, and then a wall of water reared high and crashed through Asgore's garden, sweeping her away like a scrap of garbage and flooding the Underground.

In a different dream, she was falling through an endless elevator shaft. As she cartwheeled down, down, down, she caught glimpses of the water miles below, and despite the distance, saw the floating scraps of blue fabric and the dusty-pale creatures circling like sharks.

She dreamed that she ran out of the lab while Undyne fought the human, but couldn't reach her in time, and then she was in the secret lab, watching her friend melting and slowly suffocating, and trying to fill the tank so she could use her gills, but the glass was cracked and the water kept spilling back out.

Sometimes she only heard voices. Asgore, Undyne, Mettaton, Sans, his brother, little Woshua and Shyren, and herds of Vulkins, and Pyropes. That spider girl in Hotland who wouldn't leave her web.

Once, she dreamed that the human destroyed the whole Underground except for the lab down below, trapping her and Sans and Undyne inside. Sans died, and she died, and Undyne was left floating alone in her tank until a tall monster (whose face she never remembered) and a wiser, kinder, _better_ Alphys came to save her, and the three of them traveled far away... then it got confusing, Undyne was covered in scars but somehow back to her old self, shaking the faceless tall monster by the collar, and then there was a monster with wings and a monster made of sparks, and a wall sprouting _arms_, which somehow related to something horrific that ended up happening to that "other" Alphys... and she both was and wasn't aware of any of those things, because her own dust was scattered on the floor of an empty lab with the wind howling outside.

She woke up with her eyes swollen from crying. Or she'd jerk awake in the middle of the night, cold and sweating through the sheets.

She'd roll over and look up at the ceiling for a while. Then she'd crawl out of bed and take a shower, scrubbing the soft scales freshly revealed when she'd last shed her skin. Sometimes she'd scroll through Undernet, sipping a soda. If they happened to be awake, she might message Bratty and Catty to talk about nothing for an hour, and swear that they needed to hang out again sometime, and then forget all about it as soon as she put her phone down. If they weren't online, she'd study the wrinkled, faded photo she'd found on the floor of the lab, which Sans must have been carrying with him. She'd wonder what secrets he'd kept, and if they could be as bad as hers.

When morning came, she went back to work.

* * *

Alphys abandoned the mole-robot idea. Even when she reminded herself how the flower had allied himself with the human, and how he had nearly murdered her and Sans and an innocent moth monster, she couldn't bring herself to hurt him, letting her robots sadistically rip him up out of the ground. He was a sapient being. And he was _Asriel_. And she didn't even know if he was alive, or if Undyne had injured him so badly that he'd...

Still halfway expecting someone to choose no leader over an incompetent one, she obsessed over the thought of what might happen after she was gone. If Asriel _had_ survived, then he was a risk, so she was glad that most monsters had been effectively scared off from venturing too close to the RUINS, but he'd only attacked her and Sans when they were stuck in an elevator, and before that, he'd fled from her and those three Madjicks. A human would have seen the four of them as free EXP. If _that_ human ever returned, they were all finished.

Alphys dreamed up designs for more puzzles, traps, everything she _should_ have used on the human when she had the chance—but as much as she liked to imagine them falling into a spike pit or getting set on fire, there was no logical reason to depend on such complicated measures. A human's powerful SOUL made it easy for them to slaughter monsters, but it wouldn't help them get out of the RUINS once that heavy stone door was sealed shut; she could have the barrier entrance guarded by a robot, one without a SOUL vulnerable to harm or a convenient "off" switch.

(That her robot happened to be Mew Mew was just a _coincidence_. Alphys was working with what she had, because what if she wasted time making it look less kawaii and then somebody assassinated her before she could finish her work, what then? She didn't even like anime anymore, not really.)

* * *

After the Determination injections, she had a few visits from monsters worried about weird things happening to their friend or parent, or whoever, and she explained what could be explained, and when she didn't know the answer to a question, she said so. She went back with them to their homes to check in on those monsters she'd helped revived, and never stopped feeling like a fraud when they were happy to see her.

Hr original plans for puzzles _inside_ the RUINS weren't going anywhere, but Alphys still met with the Madjicks, this time to improve her magic skills. She'd never be a talented mage, but she did have a certain affinity for yellow SOUL magic, so the ability to use an attack or two without completely humiliating herself seemed like a reasonable goal. When she wasn't working on her robot or accidentally zapping herself with magic, she tinkered with Cabbage's prosthetic wings—testing the power supply, streamlining the design to a more aerodynamic shape, reducing weight, replacing any worn parts. With the right prompting, she could get them to talk about whatever books they were reading lately, which made for a decent distraction from her own thoughts. They never would accept an apology for her role in their brush with death, and they said nothing about Undyne, even when Alphys brought up the topic first.

Nobody ever did kill her, or even kick her out of the castle.

* * *

Alphys meandered down the street, each hand tucked into the opposite sleeve to form a loop. She looked down at it while she walked.

The Madjicks had canceled on her at the last second, practically slamming the door on her face. Details were hazy, but it seemed one of them had a crush on some other monster and ran off for a date without telling anyone, which left behind only _two_ wizard monsters, which was an un-magical number, which was unacceptable. She didn't get the logic, but it didn't bother her much, beyond the fact it meant she had an hour or two and nothing to do with them.

Now that she wasn't spending every spare second in the lab trying to take care of Undyne, she realized just how little she had to do. As long as nothing drastic happened, she only had to give an official address once a month, and even _that_ was more of a norm than a requirement; Cabbage needed regular attention to keep their wings in ideal condition, but they seemed terrified of saying or doing anything to annoy her, or take up any more of her time than necessary; if a human fell into the Underground, Alphys was going to hide with everyone else. Otherwise, "ruling" just meant walking around in a robe and crown and doing whatever she wanted, which seemed completely wrong to her. But then, Asgore did nothing but drink tea, tend to his garden, and talk long walks around the Underground. Undyne had been running the royal guard, Alphys had been the one keeping the Core from breaking down or exploding—actually, it was the workers doing that, so...—plus actually trying to find a way out of the Underground. He had the advantage of being like ten feet tall and being around since before anyone else was even born, though...

A crowd had gathered at the end of the street leading toward the castle, forcing Alphys to stop walking before she bumped into someone. Halfway in her thoughts, she toyed with the mental image of torches and pitchforks, but the monsters weren't even facing her direction, or even her home. Instead, they were all clustered around a central figure—a lone monster with colorless hair and a grimy sweater—and clamoring no less excitedly than if it were someone like Mettaton.

"Is that really her?" ("She said so.")

"How long—"

"Are you sure?" ("What do you mean, am I sure? Either that is, or it isn't...")

"Why were you—"

"You don't have to be sarcastic about it..." ("I'm not being sarcastic!")

"_Where_ were you..?"

"Ahh, excuse me..." Alphys picked a shoulder and tapped it. "What's going on?"

A dozen faces turned to look at her. "Oh, it's Alphys!" one of them said, and they might well have all descended upon her then because there wasn't any chance of escape—but they actually did the opposite. Monsters jostled, tripping into each other in their rush to clear a path between Alphys and...

"...H-hi, Undyne," she said, faintly.

Just as in the lab, Undyne didn't seem to even hear her. She didn't seem to hear _any_ of the other monsters, stiff and silent with both hands clenched into fists, so tight that the trembled. As Alphys watched, a puppy in pink overalls stretched out his neck to sniff Undyne's sweater, then scampered back with a puzzled whine.

Finally, Undyne looked up at her.

After what she'd done to keep her friend alive and (so she'd _thought_) safe, she was accustomed to anger and resentment, thought that awareness was tempered by the knowledge that she might have felt differently, if only she understood the reasoning behind Alphys' actions—so that anger didn't quite count. And before then, Alphys had thought that she already knew what an angry Undyne would _normally_ look like; she was so loud and animated and eager to throw herself into a fight at all times, and she always talked about beating people up, for reasons ranging from actual evil to calling Alphys mean names as a kid. Except for the very first moment they'd met, Alphys had never been _afraid_ of her.

Slowly, as if she knew exactly what was going through Alphys' mind, and wanted to make her squirm, Undyne crossed the empty space between them. The other monsters hung back, watching with wide eyes, and Alphys wondered if murder was maybe back on the table after all. She didn't even know how to feel about that—at least it meant she had confirmation that Undyne didn't just die two minutes after leaving the bridge, regardless of whatever the yellow bird's note had said, and she was maybe kind of almost _okay_...

"_Al...phys._"

"Wh-what?"

"You used... Det...ermination... on other people," she said—repeated, she must have already asked something that Alphys missed—so slowly and deliberately that Alphys thought she was either being made fun of or having another weird nightmare or both. But then Undyne coughed heavily into her sleeve, her painfully straight posture crumpling at the edges. The other monsters tittered, whispered to each other, afraid to get too close.

"Undyne?!" Alphys tried to rush to her side, only to bump straight into the hand Undyne held out to ward her off.

"M—fine," she mumbled.

"You're—but are you—it's been a r-really long time since I, we, um—I didn't know all along if you were... wh-what happened? Before, when I, um, when we last saw each other, you were..."

"Different..? Or just... worse at... holding... ...together." She coughed again, or maybe laughed. Her eye was still inky black, just as it had been in the lab. "Tell... me... what you... did... to them..."

"Wh-where WERE you? Your clothes are all muddy..."

"Just... tell... me."

"B-but—"

"_Tell. Me._"

The monsters watching went horribly quiet. Were they about to see Alphys get her head ripped off? No, they already were. Oh god. "Ahhh. I don't... know how much you might have already heard about the Amalgamates—th-that's what we've started calling them—and it's kind of a long story, I never t-told you—"

"I know. About... them. You... used _it_... on more monsters... after... you brought me... back. AFTER... you saw... what happened. To me. You did it. Again. _**Why.**_"

"M-maybe this isn't the best place to d-discuss..."

"Here... is fine."

Was it 'fine'? Alphys had seen how stiff and uncomfortable Undyne had been when the other monsters were surrounding her, so she could only imagine how it felt to be in the middle of a city street after spending so much time alone in the lab. "...Okay. O-okay," Alphys clamped her hands behind her back. "Yes. I used Determination to... bring back monsters who were going to die. More of them. Their families asked me to do whatever I could to help, and there was a way for me to do that, rather than letting them all turn to dust, so I... if I didn't think it would work this time, I w-wouldn't have done it, but, but, I've learned, I did it all wrong before, I did EVERYTHING wrong, but I _learned_ from—last time." She suddenly wondered how Undyne even knew it was called Determination, but she had little time to analyze it. One of the other monsters must have told her before Alphys arrived. "And th-they're okay! I mean, there have been certain, um, side-effects, some w-w-weird stuff like their eye colors changing, but they're alive. Everyone who... could be... treated. There wasn't enough for everyone, so..."

Undyne stared as if she didn't believe a word Alphys had said—Alphys would have been more surprised if she _did_ believe her—and looked around to the other monsters for confirmation. By now, they had moved further back, intrigued by the drama playing out in front of them but afraid to get directly involved. They all looked to each other, until one monster, a green fluffball, raised their hand like a kid in school, and offered: "It's true. One of my friends..."

Alphys kept going. "I didn't know... w-well, I DID know what I was doing, before, but I didn't fully consider it. I thought it would work a certain way and then when it didn't, I got scared, and... it was selfish, so maybe it won't ever be possible to make it up to you, and if you're angry forever and you hate me then th-that's okay, but I'm sorry, r-really really really sorry."

"Do you... get... what you did... or do you just want me to... shut... up?"

"W-what?! N-no!"

"_Then... stop... saying... you're 'sorry',_" Undyne growled the words so harshly that she had to stop, doubling over coughing. By the time she recovered enough to go on, her voice had softened. Alphys wasn't sure if she was any less angry, or if she just couldn't go any louder without further wrecking her voice. "...I... want... to see them."

The monsters around them stared with the same kind of paralyzed fascination she'd felt as she watched the human on her monitor, except for the furry monster who'd spoken up, who'd nervously fluffed themselves to the point that she couldn't see any face at all.

"W-we c-can... do that."

"All. Of... them."

"Okay. We will," Alphys promised. What else could she say?

* * *

And just like that, Undyne wasn't gone anymore.

Keeping the name of the monster she'd resurrected a secret was the only gesture toward carefulness Alphys had made in weeks, and now she was introducing that monster to what felt like half the city's population. Even with her extra precautions—taking the meetings slowly, keeping them in the quiet familiarity of the castle whenever she could—it all felt like another chance for a situation to blow up in her face. Undyne wasn't the monster she had been.

(There were slimy footsteps looping throughout the castle, ending at the door and tracing back to the bedrooms and the kitchen and the stairs leading up from the hallway which led to the throne room which led to nothing, because that route stopped at a dead end. Unless you could either teleport or walk in through the barrier, there was no way to enter the castle from that side.)

Or maybe it was better for her to see these monsters under this set of circumstances. They were all so small, birds and little frogs, or monsters made of paper or vapor, small and nonthreatening and mostly young and—except for Cabbage's sibling, who must have been too shy to want to visit—curious about Undyne, the one monster who hadn't just been cured of a terminal condition, but _killed_ and then brought back into existence. Some of these visitors were noisier than Undyne might have preferred, but after each one left, she calmed down a little more, and none of them seemed to notice that she looked or moved or sounded any different than she always had. Monsterkind had been nearly destroyed, but to the ones who survived, Undyne was still a heroine. However little she might have believed in herself at this point, she was still the one who'd bought them time to escape by fighting the human. They all knew what she'd done. Didn't they?

(There were times when Undyne stared off into space, sometimes mouthing words when she thought Alphys wasn't looking, and Alphys had a feeling that there was a lot more effort going into what Undyne had called 'holding together' than she'd admitted. Her scales crawled.)

Alphys was so grateful to those monsters, it almost didn't matter that Undyne was clearly only tolerating Alphys' presence for the sake of making sure she hadn't actually killed someone. Once every Determined monster had come to the castle to drink tea and fail to hide the fact that they were staring, she would go back to wherever she'd been hiding and never be seen again. She never _said_ so, but Alphys was sure it would end that way.

Before she could learn if she was right or wrong, another monster came looking for Undyne.

* * *

"(Yo... maybe this is a bad idea. Mom and D—)"

"You're not supposed to say 'Mom' anymore, dummy."

"(Dad and... uh... ...our PARENTS are gonna be worried. I th-think we should go home.)"

"NOW you decide to be a big baby?"

"(H-hey! I'm not a baby!)"

A fluffy little raptor girl and a smaller kid with yellow scales and a big bandage on their knee were at the doorstep, the smaller kid making futile armless efforts to drag their sister away. They went dead silent once they saw Alphys, as if they'd just been caught trying to rob the place, and the smaller one shivered, like they somehow sensed the images in Alphys' head. _The human. The bridge. And then..._

"Um, hiya!" she heard herself say. "What are you guys doing here? Shouldn't you be at school?"

The girl shoved her sibling toward Alphys. They stumbled, caught themselves, and tried for a friendly smile, though it quavered around the edges. "Y-yo! Um, we were, um... I heard... I mean, I was just... like, wondering if... um..." they trailed off, each word smaller and more shriveled than the last, until they scurried back and tried to take shelter under their sister's wing. She elbowed them aside and rolled her eyes.

"We heard Undyne was here in the city. _ALIVE_. Is it a bunch of crap, or not?"

The smaller kid practically vibrated. Alphys thought about what a horrible person she'd be for even thinking about slamming the door shut in their face, and then realized that maybe she actually really _shouldn't_ let them in, and then she heard a voice from indoors:

"...Al...phys..?"

and the yellow kid darted straight past her. Alphys hadn't even heard Undyne get up, but when they tripped over nothing and swung down into a near-faceplant, she was already there to catch them.

"Hey. I... remember you," Undyne said. Impossibly, she glanced over to Alphys, as if _Alphys_ might know how to handle this. "It's... been... a while, huh?"

How did they even know? Undyne certainly hadn't been in Snowdin any time recently, and the yellow kid was high on the list of things Alphys usually tried not to think about, for the sake of her SOUL and sanity. Some other kid at their school must have told them—that puppy, maybe. Surprising that they would have believed it. Alphys had the kind of school experience that left her inclined to suspect she was being pranked when something happened that was just too good.

If the kid noticed the fraction of a second Undyne took to re-balance herself, her hands staying on their shoulders for a few moments after she'd already tipped them back up to their feet, they didn't bother complaining. They were too busy staring like they'd just seen an angel.

And then they started to cry. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm _sorry_," the kid wailed, their apologies turning muffled as they buried their face into Undyne's stomach, which was thankfully so covered up in layers of clothes that the contact left no mark, even if her hands had already trailed slimy gray spots on their sweater.

As Undyne clumsily lowered herself to the younger kid's level and slid an arm around their shoulders, Alphys had a feeling that she didn't belong here, like she was seeing something that wasn't _for_ her. At some point, the yellow kid's big sister had slithered around her to get a look at what was going on.

"How about we go, ahh... hang out somewhere else for a little while?" Alphys said, motioning for her to move away. "I just made tea, and... um... ...do you like robots?"

* * *

After a last burst of friendliness as they shepherded the kids back home (_no, it's fine that they came over to say hi, we're happy to have them..._) Undyne went straight back to silence, drifting ahead with her faced turned up toward the gently-falling snowflakes.

Alphys followed as far as Sans and Papyrus' house before she slowed. Old junk mail sat piled around Sans' mailbox, soggy from the snow; one of the bulbs on the string lights at front flickered irregularly. A sick feeling twisted through the pit of Alphys' belly, not unlike the sensation she'd felt after finding Cabbage in the RUINS, close to becoming dust. Her feet were numb with cold.

By the time she snapped out of it, Undyne was already waiting for her in the Riverperson's boat. At least she'd bothered to wait.

"So... it t-turned out that kid's sister has some r-REALLY b-bad taste in anime. Who knew?" Alphys said as she climbed in, her teeth chattering. "Ahh... what did you guys talk about? If it's okay to ask, I mean."

"They kept... asking if I was... mad at them. Heh." Undyne looked out over the side of the boat as it drifted from the shore. "They... also said they... left stuff by my house. Notes, or... something. Guess I should... look."

"Were you? Ahh, angry at them, I mean."

"Nah. Was... gonna have to... fight anyway."

Alphys futilely rubbed her hands together, but the friction wasn't nearly enough to compensate for a lack of body heat. She felt so chilly and sluggish, she almost didn't notice when Undyne spoke again.

"They... hesitated, once."

"'They'?"

"Frisk." When that lone word failed to clarify anything, Undyne went on with a full explanation that helped even less. "The human... _almost_ won, once... they could've finished it... but stopped. And just... sat there, and... STARED... at me... like a freak. So... I killed them." Satisfaction flashed across her face, but didn't last long. "...Dunno... what they were think...ing. They... didn't... hesitate... before they attacked... that kid. Not... EVER. I don't... get it. They were friends, too..."

Between each halting phrase, the Riverperson hummed peaceably. "Tra la la. The water is very clear today. That's mildly lucky."

"Do you mean... when you were following them through Waterfall?" Alphys asked, though she knew that couldn't be true. She'd watched the human from the moment they left the RUINS.

"No. Before."

"Um, sorry, but that doesn't... make sense?"

"_Before_."

"Which means..?"

The air whooshing past their faces warmed as they left Snowdin behind, and the snowflakes dotting Alphys' clothes slowly melted. Just as it seemed like Undyne wasn't going to keep going, she began to run through a story as rapidly as her clumsy speech would allow, like she'd practiced reciting it before. (Which, actually, she might have.)

The human's name was Frisk. Before they started killing people, there'd been a different version of events, a parallel world. In that version of the Underground, Frisk befriended Papyrus and Sans and a host of other monsters, including Undyne and Alphys. They helped the two of them confess their feelings to each other (...at the garbage dump...) and went to New Home, at which point _Toriel_ showed up out of nowhere, saying Frisk was _her_ child now, and then Papyrus insisted they all had to go to the barrier to stop Asgore from killing Frisk. The human had a special power that allowed them to turn back time and erase their own death, but they had no way to get past Asgore, and they were just too _nice_ for their own safety, never hitting any harder than necessary to escape a hostile monster and never striking to kill. They'd had the chance to let Undyne fry when she chased them too far into Hotland, but gave her water. They forgave Alphys for putting them into needless danger, and they never retaliated against Sans for threatening to murder them, because they knew he'd only done it out of fear. If not for their friends' intervention, they would have let Asgore take their SOUL—but everyone came to save them, so nobody died, and then they somehow broke the barrier, allowing monsterkind to leave the Underground and live alongside humanity. But Frisk still had that power. They went back to when they were a kid, back in the RUINS, and began to kill. The only monster with even the tiniest clue at what was coming did nothing to try and avert disaster.

Subtract the ending and the bizarre Sans behavior and Toriel, and add a few extra love confessions, and it sounded exactly like the unrealistic fluff Alphys used to write, back when she still wasted her time on fanfic, telling herself it _could_ maybe happen. Alternate universes... you never knew.

"You don't... believe me."

Was this what Undyne thought about in the lab—a happier fate for everyone, with peace and friendship between humans and monsters? At the end, shortly before she died, she did say she wanted to protect humanity... but why would Undyne _ever_ imagine being with her? Undyne never liked her in that way, and she definitely didn't like her, now. "Calling you a liar would be, ahh... a l-little hypocritical, I think."

"Humans, monsters, flowers, angels," the Riverperson sang, blithe and cheerful as ever. Alphys did a double-take, certain that there had been a little dog face on the prow of the boat. There wasn't.

"Gerson... didn't believe me, either," Undyne muttered, flicking irritably at the water's surface. "I'm... _right_."

Alphys had the uncomfortable feeling that she'd just failed some sort of test. "I didn't say I didn't believe you. You could be right. And not-believing isn't the same thing as thinking you're _wrong_, anyway..." Alphys said. "...W-wait. You said there was a monster who _knew_ about, um, 'Frisk', even before they left the RUINS?"

"...Think... about it. Guess."

"Um. I can't guess something without knowing anything about it... but I definitely didn't know about the human until after... and you couldn't have, either. You would have gone and stopped them sooner, if you'd _known_ sooner..." Alphys frowned. She wasn't as smart as people thought, but she also knew, abstractly, that she _probably_ wasn't as stupid as she usually felt. And she wasn't so bad at puzzles. So, what monster had some kind of information about the human, _anything_, that nobody else had?

"Sans... had a picture of us... and Toriel, and the human. I don't know where he got it, or how, but he never told anyone," she said, slowly, testing out the thought. "...As far as I know. He never told _me_. I only know because I... ahhh... ...found it."

"He might've... been able... to do more," Undyne said, distantly. "Not as... much as me. And... I don't think he... would've tried... with or without... the picture... from the other... him. Might've... though."

_The other him. _Alphys chewed on her claw, watching the water swirl past the boat. She couldn't decide if she should resent him for never bothering to mention any of this. He knew she was interested in the idea of different dimensions, having done her own research on the subject; she would've _gotten_ it. But, then, she'd never _asked_ him, even knowing how secretive he could be, because she was so afraid of pushing away one of the few friends in her life. And keeping a mysterious photo secret for no reason wasn't nearly as bad as watching a human murder people without ever trying to stop them, which was what she had done, but he could have told her. It might have made no difference in the end, but he _could_ have. Instead, she'd had to find it for herself, down in the lab.

The image of that abandoned house in Snowdin bothered her more than any creepy photo. Alphys looked at her hands. "As I mentioned, the place where I found it... um... his jacket, and some... other things... it was in the lab. Did he show it to you? Is that how you know about it? Is that... um..."

"I... saw it. You... weren't there. Didn't... kill him... 'cause of that... though."

And now Alphys had an answer to a question she'd managed to mostly avoid thinking about for entirely too long. She should have felt shocked, completely horrified, but those feelings had been hidden away for so long, that by the time she came back to retrieve them, there was just nothing, the way batteries sometimes died if you let them sit unused.

Sh wondered how the yellow kid's parents would have reacted to their child playing hooky to go find Undyne, if they'd known what she did to their neighbor. Probably not well. "Then," she said, trying to be delicate. "What... actually did happen?"

"I just... said it. If you didn't know... before... you do, now."

"That isn't what I meant. And I don't. Or, I mean, there are things that I DO know, but..." The room where Undyne had been was all trashed by the time Alphys clambered her way down to into the lab to retrieve the Determination. Semidried gray muck and shards of glass from the broken tank streaked the floor between puddles of water, and piled clothing, and the photo. It had to look even more awful and desolate now, dark and fully abandoned. A terrible dread burrowed in her SOUL. "I know you couldn't move at all... and that you were f-frustrated and... really unhappy. And... it seemed like he went to see you, for some reason... he wanted to help, maybe, I guess..." She looked up at the Riverperson, who was somehow still rowing, murmuring to themselves about hairbrushes like nothing was wrong with what they had to be overhearing. "But you were really... unwell, and you wouldn't have, I don't THINK you would have known what was happening, so a lot could have gone wrong... in all kinds of different ways..."

"That wasn't... what happened. I wasn't... EVER... that weak. I just... needed out. I needed... his magic."

"Wh-_what?_"

"You asked... what happened. Why do you think... I'm like THIS... now? I just... got better?"

"I d-don't... know?"

"I... told you. Needed... out. Needed... his magic. I... wanted to leave... and go anywhere. I wanted to... not be... falling apart... anymore." Undyne looked down at herself. "He's... with me, now."

Undyne's terse, semigarbled words somehow made the whole thing more disturbing. The comforting numbness only protected Alphys so much; she still remembered the gray footprints through the castle, leading up from a dead end, accessible from that side only if you could somehow teleport... and the piled clothing, his hoodie in a little heap by the broken tank, perfectly clean of any dust. Undyne _had_ been falling apart...

Alphys tried to block it out and focus on the core of what Undyne was saying, but that was no better. She could never quite believe it was even _possible_ for Sans to die. She'd once thought Undyne was invincible, too, but Undyne was still the type of monster to throw herself into danger. Sans had just disappeared when the human came near, he was smart, he could literally _teleport_. How could anything hurt him? How could _Undyne_ hurt him? Alphys was no better than a mad scientist, locking people in a basement and experimenting on them, but she'd never murdered anyone, let alone... done _that_. Was it even possible? It couldn't be less improbable than what Alphys herself had done to all those poor monsters. But Undyne was a _heroine_. How could this confession, if that was what this was meant to be, have any truth to it?

The boat pulled up to the dock. The Riverperson, bobbing gently on the prow, pulled up their oar and twirled away droplets of water, humming and humming and humming until Alphys wanted to throw something, and instead put her head in her hands, claws pressing into her temples. "Don't say things like that. You were _sick_. Y-you couldn't even _speak_."

"I could. You... wouldn't... have listened."

"This doesn't even make sense."

"Still... happened."

Alphys wanted to say Undyne's story was impossible, but there were monsters who were part of the Amalgamates that now thought of themselves as Shyren's sister or Snowdrake's mother... which could only work if most of their personalities were pushed down, or somehow absorbed into the minds of the stronger monsters in control... except even that wasn't so bad because none of them had _murdered_ each other, it was all just a horrible accident that they'd ended up together. An accident. Even if Undyne was telling something close to the truth, it had to have been an accident. Yet she didn't sound like she felt any regret for what she'd done.

All those monsters Alphys had brought to see Undyne, because Undyne was so concerned that something terrible had happened to them, plus that little kid...

"Wh-what do I even tell people? It's... like I've been lying to all of them, now, by not saying anything..."

The boat tipped back and forth as Undyne slid across the bench and shakily disembarked. "Do whatever you want... about what I said. It doesn't... make any difference... to me. Or... him," she said—which was even _less_ than no help at all.

Alphys sat numbly, until she heard the Riverperson patiently asking whether there was someplace else she'd like to go, for what had to be the fourth or fifth time. Their face was invisible under their hood.

* * *

Without dust, there was no _proof_ that Sans was dead, even if Alphys couldn't think of many benign scenarios that could leave such a horror-movie of a scene behind. The grime and broken glass.

At no point had she imagined _this_—that Sans hadn't only died, but that he'd been brought back, and in a way that was somehow even worse than what had happened to Undyne. She at least had _wanted_ to live, so, so much, and Sans... it wasn't that he would have wanted to be dead, but Alphys could imagine him being with his brother again, somewhere. Instead he was trapped in-between, and it was Alphys' fault as much as anyone else's. But oh, _god_, she was so tired of dwelling on all the terrible things she'd caused in her life. It never helped.

_Just do your job already, Alphys_, was her new mantra—but how was she supposed to follow it _now_?

She tried to go on living as she had been, minus some of the invincibility of not caring, plus some of the gnawing anxiety that her apathy had kept safely below the surface, like a layer of ice. She couldn't focus on her robot anymore and her magic was all over the place; even Cabbage started skipping wing repairs as soon as they heard about Undyne's reappearance—Alphys worried that they might _actually_ remember seeing Undyne in the lab after all, before realizing that everybody else pretty much knew now. And Alphys still didn't know how to help Undyne; there was no guessing how much of the change in her personality was a permanent side-effect of higher LV, and how much was the result of being trapped in a tank for way too long, which was maybe possibly hopefully fixable somehow. Regaining her speech and mobility had done little to improve her outlook on life, but at no point had she been physically threatening, whether toward that monster kid, or the other Determined monsters, or even Alphys herself, who _actually _deserved her wrath, and that had to mean something.

Alphys hoped that as time passed and distance allowed her some sense of objectivity, she could think up some sort of plan—if not to repair their friendship, then at least, to fix some of the damage she'd done. But it didn't help. This wasn't the kind of problem she knew how to deal with, like a bugged line of code or a broken machine.

She'd already tried everything she could think of to cure the Amalgamates, long ago, and completely failed; miraculously returning Sans to a normal existence was never going to happen. Even if she could bring herself to punish Undyne, he would have to suffer with her. Unacceptable. The fact that he'd had some tiny bit of forewarning about Frisk made no difference; Alphys had done worse by failing to stop them, even after they began to kill people. Punishing Undyne and Sans together wasn't the answer. But doing nothing, acting as if he'd never existed, seemed equally wrong.

At difficult times like these, she might have wondered what Asgore would do, but Asgore never would have gotten himself into such a nightmare. Except by extension, giving Alphys the opportunity to set it all into motion...

God. Oh god.

Undyne was _alive_, and maybe not okay, but not dying, and Alphys had felt happier when she was gone.

Undyne stopped showing up at the castle. Most likely, that had been her plan as soon as she'd confirmed Alphys hadn't melted anybody else; maybe she felt ashamed after that not-quite-confession in the Riverperson's boat.

Alphys, not having the luxury of avoiding the topic, finally just told the truth. She left out the details—nobody needed to know what the scene had looked like, all the glass, the gray water—but she told them Sans was gone, if not quite _dead_, all with the nagging worry that it made just as little sense as Undyne's story about the magical universe where everybody got to live happily ever after.

Afterward, as monsters filed out through the castle, toting lights and sound equipment and cameras, Alphys distantly wondered how anyone could draw a floor plan that required visitors to the throne room to tramp through the Dreemurrs' living spaces, and think, _ah yes, what a well-designed castle, how totally flawless_. Once she was alone, and could no longer distract herself with mentally insulting some long-dead architects, she smothered the urge to shriek. Was it a lie to leave out the part with Sans' dust and his magic, or would it have been worse to try and explain something she didn't understand? Whatever respect she might've still had, she probably lost it when Undyne came back and all but eviscerated her. Maybe she wouldn't get the violent revolt she'd dreamed of, after all. Just irrelevance. Did it matter what she said or did? Sans was still dead.

Alphys wandered off, found a half-empty can of soda, gulped the rest. Light-headed, as if she'd consumed something a little stronger than sugar and caffeine, she headed for Waterfall. She didn't even know for sure that Undyne would be at her house, but she took a guess, and for once, got lucky. Undyne was by the pond, looking into the water as she approached. She was wearing a different sweater than the last time Alphys saw her. The pattern of gray stains around her sleeves was a little different.

"What... do you want?" she asked. Her tone wasn't quite as cold as the words themselves implied, but not by much.

Alphys clamped her hands together. It didn't stop them from jittering. It never did. "I told everyone what you said you did. You told me to do whatever I wanted, so... ...w-well, I just thought you should know."

"This is... your nice way... of saying I'm... going to jail, now?"

"Wh-what? No!"

"It's... the normal punishment, for... killing a monster. Whether he's... still around or... not... he DID die."

Undyne said it as if she didn't care at all about what she'd done, or thought she did. Alphys had never doubted that what had happened to Sans in the lab was an accident—how could it be otherwise, with Undyne in such a terrible state?—but a little more guilt, or regret, or _something_, would've been more reassuring. "I'm not going to throw you in jail. That won't... even if I'm really bad at it, my job is to help everyone, and... do my best to make sure they're okay. That includes you. And being isolated forever won't help you, or... h-him, or anybody else."

Undyne looked at her, and Alphys wished she hadn't said anything. Or come here at all. "It's not good... for monsters... to be alone. You... think that? Do you... REALLY think that?"

"I—" Alphys began to apologize, before she remembered how Undyne responded the last time she tried. "...If Sans is... p-part of you, now... I don't fully know how that works... does it mean he can hear all this?"

"What... you want me to say hi?" Undyne said gruffly.

"N-no. Ah. Actually, I mean—y-yes? But I was just... if he's there, I wanted to try to find a way to... help. I don't know. He's... alone now, sort of, isn't he? I... can't imagine either of you are really... I know you weren't very close, before, so..." She sounded so stupid, she just knew it. "If there was something that _would_ make you guys happy... I want to know what it is."

Undyne gave her a look like she thought she really was stupid, but she _was_ definitely thinking. Then Alphys jumped as a jagged spear flashed into existence in Undyne's grasp. She spun it in a lazy arc before letting its thin, splintered point rest harmlessly against the ground. The blue light reflected off the water and left ghostly shadows over her sweater, her pale face. "You don't... have a royal guard. Sans... knows you... don't. Didn't see the point. Since you don't have one... and you... aren't going to do anything to exact justice... _against_ me, then..."

Moving faster than she would have thought possible of herself and startling them both, Alphys yanked the spear out of Undyne's hand. It felt scratchy under her fresh new scales. "_No_. You aren't doing that."

"You... asked... what I wanted."

"Wanting to punish yourself d-doesn't count!"

Undyne made a noise between a cough and a laugh. "Wasn't... talking about... stabbing myself..."

"You were thinking about fighting humans, weren't you? That's not any b-better!" Alphys gripped tightly to the spear in her hand, until the soft scales hurt. It was hard, but oddly porous, with a surface similar to...

She threw the spear aside, and not the way you were supposed to throw a spear. It made a sound like a live electrical wire as it struck the ground and rolled to the wall.

Undyne stepped away from the water, tried to snap her fingers, failed, and waved her hand instead. The spear fizzled into sparks and faded. "Did... I ever tell you? I... don't think... I can... get hurt... anymore. This kid... tried to bite my hand..." Undyne shook her head, spotting Alphys' expression. "Not the... yellow kid. Someone... else. And... that flower... thing... used to come to the lab... it tried to attack you, once... it tried to... hit me with magic. Didn't... work."

Alphys scraped her hand across the front of her robe, trying to somehow erase the feeling of bone from her scales. Undyne had _not_, in fact, mentioned anything about invincibility, or getting bitten, or whatever on earth she was talking about. "I don't want you to risk getting hurt. Or g-getting HIM hurt."

"Then what... do you WANT me... to do?"

"Not _that_." Alphys pulled her arms around herself, looking down at her reflection. Her glasses really needed cleaning. "...Maybe it's stupid to still think I can help. My 'help' never actually... helps, and I don't even know h-how I could make it up to you for what I did, even if you let me. But I just don't want you guys to... just be miserable all the time. If that means leaving you alone forever, that's okay. I can do that. I just... don't want you to end up dead. Um. Again. Or... wishing that you were."

"Now that... I know more... I almost wish you'd tried to... help someone else. Or more people, instead, but... if this was how it was going to turn out..." Undyne glared into the water. "...Except, it didn't... HAVE to... turn out... like THAT. You... didn't have to... leave me... down there. Maybe... you thought... something worse would... happen. If you didn't. Doesn't... make a difference. You still... LEFT me... there. You don't... know what it's LIKE. At least... everyone else... they weren't just trapped, ALONE."

Alphys nodded. She had no defense; she saw no point in trying.

To her surprise, Undyne's expression softened again, almost too faintly to notice. "But I did get to... see that kid... and it made them... really happy. That's not... nothing."

"Is that... enough for YOU to be happy... or at least okay with... ...I d-don't... really know how to put it."

"I don't wish I was... just... dead, instead of... this. But... you could tell me... one thing. When you built Mettaton..." Undyne tapped her fingers around the sleeve of her sweater. The fabric was soaked gray and made little squelching noises under her touch. "No, forget it. But... if you're... uh... looking, like... for a wishlist, or... something... finding some way for me to not... get slime everywhere... WITHOUT... needles, or... anything... that would help, I guess."

Alphys didn't have much time to think about the non sequitur about Mettaton—and oh, joy, there was something _else_ that she'd lied to Undyne about, her robot with an allegedly synthetic SOUL—before catching onto the rest. It wasn't the most decisive-sounding answer Alphys could have gotten, but it was still more than she would have hoped for, to have _anything_ she could actually do to help. And help for _real_, this time. "I c-could do that."

"Great," Undyne said, without any of the warmth that would usually go with that word. "By the way... about Sans... he's not mad at you. In case you wanna know. You're not the one who—" she swiped a finger across her neck and gave a stomach-turning smile. "...Kkkhh."

"Oh. Um. ...Th-thanks."

* * *

Safe to say, there wouldn't be any more anime marathons or rambling late-night conversations about the surface world and what humans might really be like—definitely not _that_—or hours of Alphys blabbing about her goofy theories on alternate universes while Undyne listened, inexplicably rapt. Maybe not for a long time. Maybe never.

But Undyne didn't die.

As best as Alphys understood, Undyne was (for lack of any nicer-sounding word) still a blob. She hadn't returned to "normal", and if she hadn't by now, she probably wasn't going to, but she was malleable enough that she could reshape herself into a decent approximation of what she was supposed to look like, just as she had been doing all along, and she'd gotten better at both remembering and physically retaining that shape. Thus the goo, and, to an extent, her speaking difficulties and clumsiness; it took effort to stay in one solid form, and even more as a literal fish out of water.

It would be a fascinating case study in how magic and matter interacted, if only, well...

Digging through old science textbooks salvaged from the dump, years ago, Alphys found pictures of human divers she halfway remembered from her teens. Lacking fins or gills of their own, humans wore flippers and goggles and special tight-fitting suits made from a special kind of semi-waterproof foam that could keep them warm while they swam. For a monster made of goo, it might help.

The first attempt was shaky at best. The second one was a little better.

Regaining her old agility was still going to be painfully slow process, and as much as it might help Undyne feel more like herself, the suit could do little to help the underlying problem of... goo. Somehow, none of this especially stood out to Alphys as a serious issue. The situation could have been worse. So, so much worse.

* * *

Undyne, to the shock of absolutely no one, was not exactly the most popular person in the Underground by this point. Monsters stopped coming to the castle; when she went past, at least with Alphys with her, they went quiet, and Alphys wasn't quite sure if they were scared or angry or confused or all of those things.

If Undyne was upset about Alphys destroying her reputation, she didn't complain.

There were still a few monsters still willing to be near her. Reaper Bird, under circumstances that made Alphys want to scream if she thought about them for too long, had already met Undyne, but Endogeny wagged its tail and frothed with excitement as soon as it saw her; Lemon Bread actually smiled, and the Memoryheads chattered and buzzed as if they were old friends, though nobody was quite sure where they had come from or which monsters they had once been; Snowdrake's mother remembered her own identity and not much else, but Undyne sat quietly with her for a while, anyway, while Snowdrake's father hovered nervously in the background. (Alphys couldn't help but notice that none of these monsters were residents of Snowdin.)

In braver moments, Alphys asked more questions about Sans. What could he feel? What could he see? Could he still think? Could he speak, if he wanted to, if Undyne let him do it?

Undyne reminded her of what she'd already said, that he wasn't mad at Alphys for their situation. True or not, it wasn't an answer to any of her questions—Alphys was quickly noticing a pattern there—but it was the only answer she ever received for a long time.

* * *

The RUINS were full of ghosts, everyone knew that, but there was still one more thing for Alphys to do before she could feel like the Underground was safe. She hadn't been aware that some of those ghosts were the literal kind.

"How long have you been hanging around here, Napstablook..?" Alphys asked.

"for a while... there's never anybody around..." they mumbled, making upside-down not-quite-eye-contact from their spot on the floor. Their gaze slowly drifted away. "...undyne?"

"Yep. Still... me."

"oh. i thought you were dead... someone came to my house asking for you... so that's what i told them... sorry for getting it wrong..."

"I was. Came back." Undyne shrugged. "You really thought... THAT would... stop me?"

Alphys ran her claw over her bag's strap, shifting from one foot to the other.

"...oh... i just remembered... i made you a cd... a long time ago... but i never gave it to you, and then i thought it was too late... i should've checked... ...sorry..." Napstablook turned translucent, like they wanted to sink down through the floor.

"Ahh, wait!" Alphys said. "Could you please do us a favor? If you happen to see a talking flower... tell them to meet us at the other side of the RUINS, please."

"...if you want..."

After Napstablook was gone—probably headed straight back to Waterfall—they went up into what had been Toriel's home. Alphys unzipped her bag and trotted through the house, setting up cameras in each room like hidden Easter eggs—between the wilted leaves on a potted water sausage, under beds, behind a book on the shelf, in the cramped little space between the fridge and the kitchen sink. Undyne trailed from room to room like a cat, staying just close enough to keep her in sight. It didn't fully erase the memory of a bug monster's blood smeared on her hands, but she hadn't expected it to, and she still felt better than if she'd come here alone. She didn't look at the cracked pane on the front window.

"How long do you... think these are gonna last?" Undyne asked. She was wearing a long coat with a fluffy hood that went a long way in hiding the black neoprene reaching up to her neck; the only other visible parts of the suit were over her hands, and could've easily passed for plain gloves, like any person might wear for a walk through Snowdin. Alphys was just happy to see that no goo was seeping out through the seams.

"Without Core power, not indefinitely. But these battery packs really have a punch, so they'll keep working for years!"

"What about... _him_?"

"Oh." Alphys sighed. "In that case... maybe not so long, unless he misses one. We'll have to see."

Once she finished in the house, they moved deeper into the RUINS, placing cameras in cracks in the wall or buried amidst fallen leaves, or under a spilled candy dish. They walked as far as they could go, until they stood at the edge of the flower bed. Overhead was a sliver of watery blue sky, bright enough to force Undyne back into shadow, hissing. Alphys cringed apologetically, but Undyne just waved for her to go on.

"Um, Asriel?"

The wind whistled over the cliff's edge, up beyond the barrier.

"We know you're here."

"Ahh... there are some things I wanted to say. To begin with... um, I guess I don't need to tell you that I've... done some terrible things, and made mistakes that hurt people... and I've tried to apologize t-to most of them, and make amends, but I never did tell YOU that I was sorry. It might not mean much, since you probably hate me... ImeanyoudidtrytodropmedownanelevatorshaftsoIthinkthat'sastrongsignthatyouhateme... ...but I'm sorry for... what I did. I'm sorry. I just want you to know."

Alphys swallowed, starting to feel a little stupid as she spoke to empty air.

"I... also know what YOU'VE done. And to monsters who never hurt you... who never would have wished you harm, even if they knew you existed. You helped that human when they tried to commit an _atrocity_, and you personally, permanently maimed an innocent monster for no good reason, and you tried to murder my friend Sans along with me, just because we were in the same place—"

"Nah... he REALLY hated Sans... all along," Undyne corrected. "Wasn't... even the first time."

"—You t-tried to murder m-my friend Sans, _more than once._ And those are only the things I know about. There might be more. There must be more." Alphys sighed and folded her hands, waiting for what felt like a polite amount of time. Asriel, assuming he was even listening, didn't take the opportunity to defend himself, so she continued. "But... I don't want anyone else to die. So... I've decided to let you stay here in the RUINS, in peace. I can't promise that I'll NEVER be back, and I think Napstablook is just... doing their own thing... b-but I'll ensure that nobody bothers you. In return... you've given me no reason to trust you, at all, not EVER. So, if I ever see you outside this place... even just for a minute... even if you aren't doing anything bad... I'll make sure that you can't hurt any more of my subjects. WE will."

Alphys paused.

"Oh, and the cameras... they're here so we can watch for humans. As long as you behave, I'm not interested in spying on you, but I WILL be annoyed if you break them. So... please don't do that."

Her scales itched as if she were being watched, the air holding that particular stillness of a held breath. A soft breeze rustled through the flowers; a droplet of slimy water _plinked_ on the ground from Undyne's hair. Alphys wondered if it would've made a difference if she'd asked her to stay behind, even if she was afraid to come to the RUINS alone. She still had no real idea if Asriel was still here.

A hand touched her elbow, cool and light, transferring no heat through the thick material of the suit. "Done... here?"

Alphys pushed back the impulse to hug her. She didn't know why she felt it, maybe it was just the touch; she couldn't remember the last time Undyne had done that. Maybe Asriel's little flowery ghost was completely, absolutely gone, and Undyne had actually killed _two_ people. Not that she was afraid of being next. It just made the gesture seem worse somehow. She didn't try it.

"Y-yeah. Let's... go home."

* * *

Undyne told her more about the other world, that night.

The surface was beautiful, but imperfect enough that the human scientists were interested in what help Alphys could offer. Knowledge about magical energy sources, methods for cleaning up the messes their ancestors left behind. Not the same ancestors that locked monsterkind away, though it would've been extra poetic if it had been. And there was a school—Undyne hadn't mentioned it the first time—a school for human and monster children in Ebott, founded by none other than Toriel. Their own child went there.

Later, Undyne tried to explain an idea that Sans had been considering. Frisk's human SOUL made them inherently lethal, but their special power to turn back time, which had made them literally unstoppable, was only tied to Determination. Before Frisk came along, the Asriel-flower had been Determined enough to wield that power, and now that they were gone, Undyne had taken over. It didn't seem to work quite as well for her—she could only go back so far in time—but that didn't even matter. For as long as Undyne lived, even if she never did anything with her godly new power, even accounting for the boost Frisk must have obtained by absorbing Asgore's SOUL, they would _still_ be at a disadvantage, suddenly unable to retry fights until they'd memorized their enemies' patterns. And if she _did_ use it, then Frisk couldn't hurt anyone in the Underground. _Nobody_ could.

(It occurred to Alphys, a little later, that Undyne had reason not to be truthful about this power of hers, or about what Sans thought of it. What if she could go back and erase his death, and just didn't want to? But it wasn't like Undyne was perfectly happy with their arrangement, so if she _did_ have the ability to go back and try for a different outcome, there was no particular reason why she couldn't do that. And supposing that she _was_ lying, why would she tell a lie that made her look worse? Even Alphys knew better than that, and she was the one with the history of compulsive lying.

Without any way to perfectly determine the truth, Alphys chose to take Undyne at her word.)

Undyne didn't sound especially happy, considering how _massively_ OP this all sounded. But Undyne had also spent her whole life training with Asgore or the guard to become a strong warrior, capable of protecting the whole Underground. All that effort, and it amounted to practically nothing compared to what could have been accomplished by injecting herself with a gallon of Determination and then taking a nap. Undyne never _said_ any of that, but as someone with years of experience in viewing her own life choices in the worst possible light at all times, Alphys knew.

Realistically, Alphys was the one who should have known about the Determination, not Undyne—she was the royal scientist, she was the one who'd studied it, who'd _named_ it. But even so, what could she have done? She'd already pumped monsters full of Determination, which turned out horribly, and didn't result in anyone being able to stop Frisk from turning back time. If Undyne never went down the path to being the captain of the royal guard, if she just went off and became a mercenary or something, then she probably wouldn't have met Alphys, which meant Alphys would have died, which meant that the Determination experiments might never have happened, so the injection-and-a-nap plan wouldn't have happened, and maybe wouldn't have _needed_ to happen, because there would have been a more competent new royal scientist to take over after Alphys. Sans, maybe. But this all would have been moot, if only Asgore had absorbed the six SOULs as he should have done all along.

And if Frisk hadn't decided take away their happy ending, then _none of this_ would have mattered, and nobody would have died.

There were just too many _what if_s, it was impossible to say what could have been. Impossible, and pointless. Frisk couldn't use their power anymore anymore. They hadn't come back yet, and maybe they never would. What would be the point? They already murdered as many monsters as they could find. They had Asgore's SOUL, and they'd taken the six human SOULs. The surface was impossibly huge. There was nothing left for them here.

* * *

Weeks became months. Summertime was coming. Soon it would be a full year since the near-annihilation of monsterkind.

If Undyne was never quite as warm or energetic as she'd once been, Alphys accepted it as the price paid for an outcome that would otherwise have been too good to be true. She was alive, and she _wanted_ to be alive, and between her weird magical invulnerability plus the power she'd inherited from Frisk, she was going to stay that way for a very, very long time, and as long as she was around, the Underground was perfectly safe.

No, it _was_ all too good to believe, even accounting for what had become of Sans. Maybe that was why Alphys struggled so hard to let herself accept it. Even after the day came and went, and she gave the obligatory speech they all expected of her—about the passage of time, about how monsterkind had survived by working together, about her mistakes, and how they had forgiven her even when she didn't deserve it, how Undyne had taken actions that she, too, was atoning for, by choosing to do good and ensure the Underground was safe—she was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the cosmic punchline to arrive, even more worried than when she thought Undyne and Sans were gone forever, and that everyone secretly wanted her dead. She could never be too happy for too long before something horrible happened, and something horrible would _have_ to happen, because it always did, and always would, because this was the Underground, and monsterkind's history was a cycle of tragedy, first the war and then Chara and then all this.

The dread curdled into a buzzing desperation, past experience telling her to do whatever she could to be happy, _now_, before this reprieve ended and her life imploded and she went back to where she'd begun, painfully lonely and always regretting what she could have said and done, but didn't. Eventually Undyne would change her mind and decide she couldn't stand the sight of Alphys anymore, or she'd die, or maybe there would be a violent revolution after all. Maybe Frisk would come back and try to kill everybody they'd missed the first time, just to prove Alphys' hunch wrong.

With Sans "around" all the time, sort of—according to Undyne, he actually slept a lot, and spent even more time buried in memories, mostly uninterested in whatever she happened to be doing at the moment—there was a limit to the level of bad decisions Alphys and Undyne could make without it feeling hideously creepy. This was probably for the best; Alphys had learned just enough from anime to know that anime wasn't a reliable source of information on certain topics, and Undyne was only slowly beginning to not-in-that-way like her again. Anything too impulsive would have crushed the tentative little bond between them as it tried to regrow, after having been all but destroyed.

One year became two.

Life in the Underground went on.

The casually self-destructive, passive acceptance that had helped her survive in darker times gave way to real calm; she still had nightmares, sometimes, but they were gone in the morning, as harmless as any other dream. What Undyne had done to Sans was never going to be _okay_, and it would never _not_ matter, but she couldn't go back and undo it, even with her power.

With Alphys' plans in place and Undyne's help, Frisk was only slightly more dangerous than Alphys' bad dreams, and all signs pointed to them being humanity's problem now, which was fine by her. By that second year, she could go for a whole day without thinking about Undyne melting and dying horribly in some kind of delayed reaction to the Determination, not so much because she could somehow objectively determine that it was impossible, but because it just never happened, and there was no logical indication that it ever would.

There was never a clear turning point or specific instant in which Alphys realized she didn't need to worry anymore. But a time did come, eventually, when she believed it might be possible for everything to be okay.

* * *

"Hey... Undyne?"

"Mmhm?"

"This is kind of, ahh, a morbid topic, so if you don't want to answer, don't feel pressured or anything, but I was wondering..."

"Wondering what?"

"Do you remember what it was like, when you were, um, dead? Because, for a while... there were a few months when you were still just... dust..."

"Hmmm. Honestly... nah. I remember what happened... before then, and after... obviously. But in between, it was... nothing. Not really bad or good, just. I dunno. A big blank."

"Oh."

"Sorry if... that's, like, a boring answer."

"No, no, it isn't!"

"Wish I could... tell you something cool, like... that Viking... thing... where they're all... fighting and partying forever."

"Heh heh."

"Why do you ask?"

"..."

"Alphy?"

"I was j-just... thinking about things. That's all."

"Okay... if you say so."

"Y-yeah."

"..."

"...Undyne?"

"Mm."

"I missed you."

"Yeah."

"There was just... so much I wanted to say, th-that I knew I should have, but I was too afraid, and... it seemed to be too late..."

"...Hey, wait, are you..?"

"S-s-sorry."

"Oh, Alphys..."

"I j-j-j-just..."

"No, shhh..."

"I'm s-sorry..."

"Alphy..."

"..."

"C'mere."


End file.
